In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 7, 2012

The banyan tree in the courtyard represented a place of safety in war-torn Cambodia for seven-year-old Raami and the royal family to which she belongs -- at least it did until the Khmer Rouge chased the family members from their home.  The Khmer Rouge soldiers are in the vanguard of a “revolution” that, in the mid-1970s, turns Raami’s family into refugees.  Raami’s father, Ayuravann, is a prince and a poet, her grandmother is a queen, but these distinctions merely put the family at greater risk than the displaced peasants they soon join.

In the Shadow of the Banyan is a stirring account of Raami’s young life under the control of the Khmer Rouge.  The Khmer Rouge leaders do not want any Cambodian to remain rooted; individuals must be replanted, must take on new lives in service to the Revolution.  When her family is divided and forced to relocate to a rural village, Raami begins her life anew, concealing her past and watching as friends and relatives -- the ones who aren’t killed by soldiers -- die of malnutrition and disease.  Having been stricken with polio in early childhood, Raami’s limp saves her from the arduous labor to which most villagers are assigned, but nothing can spare her the grief of loss or the pain of hunger.

Vaddey Ratner’s novel is rooted in her own experience as a child in Cambodia.  It tells an emotionally intense story of courage and sacrifice.  While the story is often tragic, rebirth and transformation are the novel’s strongest themes.  Another striking theme is the commonality of man, the shared dignity of rich and poor, royalty and peasant.   “We are all echoes of one another,” Ayuravaan tells Raami, a truth the novel vividly illustrates.

Images of hope and beauty balance the despair that pervades the story. Despite the devastation she must endure daily, Raami never forgets that she is surrounded by beauty. She discovers that a momentary glimpse of the commonplace -- a dragonfly in flight -- can turn the ordinary into something beautiful. “We are capable of extraordinary beauty if we dare to dream,” says Auyravaan as he encourages Raami to dream of flight, to soar with spreading wings, to overcome her disability and the external strictures that govern her life. Although similar metaphors often descend into cheesiness in the hands of uninspired writers, Ratner avoids crossing that line by anchoring her story in truth while avoiding artistic manipulation.

The novel’s imagery is astonishing.  A farmer carves a calf from wood to hang around a cow’s neck, not to replace the mourning cow’s dead calf but “to give shape to her sorrow” -- the kind of sorrow Raami comes to understand all too well.  Recurring images -- serpents, birds in flight, the moon, gardens, mirthful spirits, an epic poem called Reamker, and (of course) banyan trees -- give shape and context to Cambodian life, connecting past to present.  So do the charming folk tales the characters tell each other.

Despite the well-documented atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, Ratner writes of individual “revolutionaries” with perception:  they are often just kids, too immature to understand the consequences of their behavior, following the Movement only because it is easier to carry a gun than to push a plow.  Big Uncle says they are “like boys playing war.”  They are illiterate, resentful of the educated, unaware of the “cause” their revolution supposedly intends to achieve.  They glorify violence to mask their own ignorance.  Given her experiences, it is a tribute to Ratner that she writes of them with such understanding.

Ratner is a graceful writer.  Her sentences flow with balletic precision.  Her word choice is impeccable.  Even if the story had been less captivating, I would recommend this novel for the beauty of its prose.  Every now and then Ratner includes a word in Raami’s native language.  Its meaning is usually apparent from the context, but even when its meaning is obscure, Ratner resists the temptation to interrupt the narrative flow with an English translation.  That might bother some readers but I’m more bothered by writers who can’t use a foreign word without immediately supplying an English translation.

In short, this is a stunning work, a powerful story skillfully told.  Although grounded in Ratner’s personal experience, it reads like the product of a seasoned novelist.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch

Published by Del Rey on July 31, 2012

Quantum entanglement is just pixie dust with the word quantum thrown in.  That, at least, is Constable Peter Grant’s explanation of magic.  Whether magic is caused by quantum entanglement or pixie dust, Grant is slowly learning to master it, a hobby that serves him well in his career with London’s Metropolitan Police.  He is assigned to the Folly, the hush-hush department (known more formally as the Specialist Assessment Unit) charged with investigating cases when “things get weird.”  Things get weird when an American named James Gallagher is stabbed to death with a sharp bit of pottery in London’s Underground -- weird in part because it isn’t clear how Gallagher got into the tunnel (his staggering exit at one of the platforms is captured on CCTV).

Something odd is taking place beneath the surface of London and it’s up to Grant to connect the underground madness to Gallagher’s death.  The mystery takes Grant (together with boss Nightingale and apprentice Lesley) on a tour of the Underground’s tunnels and London’s sewers.  A variety of magical types turn up to provide assistance or trouble (or both), including river goddesses, an Earthbender, and a half-fairy (on his father’s side).  And then there are the mysterious dwellers below London’s surface….

Grant is sort of a neophyte magician so the novel is relatively light on magic -- a good thing, from my perspective.  I’m more partial to detective work and/or humor than spell-casting and ghost-busting.  The familiar elements of a police procedural give the novel its shape and keep it moving forward at a steady pace.  Still, I recommend Whispers Under Ground not so much for its convoluted whodunit plot but for Ben Aaronovitch’s humor.   Aaronovitch’s take on law enforcement officers is consistently amusing and his good-hearted American-bashing (like his French-bashing) is priceless.

Whispers Under Ground is written with enough attitude to keep the story interesting even when it lags, as it does from time to time.  Unlike the London Underground, the plot doesn’t consistently stay on track.  Grant’s burial by the Earthbender, for instance, leads to an extended scene of no clear relevance.  It is one of a few passages that add nothing to the narrative.  Still, Aaronovitch’s snappy prose held my attention even when the story didn’t.

Aaronovitch makes occasional references to events that occurred in earlier novels in the series.  Having not read the earlier installments, those references baffled me.  I don’t think it’s necessary to read the earlier novels to understand this one, but doing so would provide helpful context.  Fortunately, although I sometimes felt like an outsider who didn’t understand the novel’s in-jokes, Aaronovitch coaxed a smile or a snicker on nearly every page, and that sufficed to earn my recommendation of this offbeat novel.

RECOMMENDED

The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H. Cook

Published by Mysterious Press on August 7, 2012 

Thomas Cook's books are always filled with penetrating insights, sharp observations of human nature. Deception and betrayal, common themes in Cook's novels, percolate from the center of The Crime of Julian Wells. Although the story is driven by a secret -- what is the crime to which the title refers? -- it is the reaction to betrayal, its poisonous impact ("like a landslide in your soul"), that gives the story its heart.

The Crime of Julian Wells begins with Julian's suicide. The suicide baffles Julian's best friend, Philip Anders, from whose perspective the story is told. Philip is a literary critic, while Julian was an expatriate writer mired in darkness who traveled the world to chronicle stories of crime and cruelty. "It was evil he was after," Philip recalls, "some core twist in the scheme of things." Also confounded by Julian's decision to end his life is Julian's sister Loretta. While Philip and Loretta both knew Julian to be restless but exuberant in his youth, they also recognized that Julian's state of mind changed after he traveled with Philip to Argentina.

The dedication in Julian's first book -- "For Philip, sole witness to my crime" -- had always seemed to Philip a joke. Julian's death causes Philip to reconsider its meaning. Obsessed with the notion that he had, in fact, witnessed a crime he failed to recognize, Philip scours his memory while embarking on his own investigation, a quest that makes him ponder the fate of two people he met in Argentina toward the end of the Dirty War, friends who subsequently disappeared: Father Rodrigo, who appeared to be a poor parish priest, and Marisol Menendez, a tour guide who assisted Julian and Philip. Following the trail from a seedy bar in Paris to a hotel bar in London favored by spies and zigzagging across the globe from there, Philip endeavors to uncover the secrets that his friends had concealed.

How does one destroy a monster, one of the characters asks Philip, without becoming a monster? Julian spent his adult life trying to identify with the victims of monsters in the hope that he could tell their stories. Through much of the novel Cook invites the reader to ask whether Julian's crime, whatever it was, made him a monster or a victim -- or both. Using a particularly clever device, Cook develops Julian's personality through the books Julian wrote. Philip rereads them after Julian's death, and the passages he quotes furnish insight into Julian's life while providing clues to his fate. His search for the truth about Julian leads Philip to some unpleasant truths about his own life.

Philip frequently alludes to (or quotes from) novelists and poets and travel writers. He often references Eric Ambler, an author with whom Cook has much in common. Like Ambler, Cook is as much a philosopher as a writer of suspense novels. He illuminates the shadows that darken the human heart. With the clarity of truth that the best fiction supplies, Cook reveals not just the pain that drove Julian to his death, but the pain that is common to all who have been broken by deception and betrayal.

Cook's plot is constructed with precision. His characters come alive with the virtues and flaws that define a life. His radiant prose is forceful and direct; this is not a novelist who wastes words. Few authors of literary suspense novels can match Cook. The Crime of Julian Wells is not Cook's best book, but it is a strong addition to his impressive body of work.

RECOMMENDED

Broken Harbor by Tana French

Published by Viking on July 24, 2012

A family of four, attacked in their Broken Harbor home. The parents stabbed, the children suffocated. The Murder Squad assignment goes to veteran Dublin detective Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy, partnered with rookie detective Richie Curran. Oddities at the crime scene include unexplained holes in the walls, a plethora of baby monitors, and a large animal trap in the attic. Before the novel's midpoint, it seems that a meticulous investigation has solved the crime, but life isn't that easy for Scorcher. The second half is strange and a little creepy (in a good way). While Broken Harbor works as a whodunit, it shines as a psychological thriller, an intense examination of the internal makeup not just of a murderer, but of murder suspects and the detectives who try to understand them.

In the universe of police procedurals, Broken Harbor stands apart. Everything about the novel feels authentic, from the detailed descriptions of evidence collection and blood splatter analysis to the subtle interaction of the characters. What seems tedious in similar novels is tense and immediate in Broken Harbor. Tana French keeps the story simmering in the first half, before slowly turning it up to a full boil. The smooth partnership that develops between Scorcher and Richie risks coming undone as Richie points out inconvenient problems with the airtight case Scorcher believes they've developed against their prime suspect.

Scorcher is opinionated and his opinions are far from politically correct. At the same time, he has a realistic view of crime and its victims. He views compassion as a liability that impedes dispassionate investigation. He has the same opinion of children ("they turn you soft"). His life is complicated by a sister who is about a half step removed from psychosis -- a more original character than the brooding wife or bitter ex-wife found in most police procedurals. His childhood is dominated by a melodramatic incident that at least serves to explain his brusque personality.

Scorcher's opinions make him interesting but his differences of opinion with Richie make the novel work. Scorcher thinks he has life all figured out, believes he understands how the world works, but Richie brings a different, conflicting perspective. Richie, unlike Scorcher, feels compassion for both victims and suspects, a difference that leads to a fascinating argument about right and wrong in the context of the case they are investigating.

In fact, apart from the curiosity the story arouses concerning whatever was going on in the attic and who the murderer might be, the evolving relationship between Scorcher and Richie is the key to the novel's success. Most of the novel's tension derives from their quarreling about the killer's identity, and the tension escalates late in the story when their lives become a tangled mess. It's not often that a thriller writer manages to combine an intriguing plot with strong, fully-textured characters, but French pulled it off.

French turns some nice phrases (a woman means to give Scorcher "an imposing stare but came off looking like an electrocuted pug dog"), but her eloquent prose is never so showy as to distract from the plot. The story maintains a steady but unhurried pace, reflecting an investigation that is urgent but careful. The ending is sad but satisfying -- very satisfying. In short, for fans of thrillers that derive their entertainment value from human drama rather than explosions and shootouts, Broken Harbor is a winner. 

RECOMMENDED

Disappeared by Anthony Quinn

Published digitally by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media on July 24, 2012 

Disappeared takes place in Northern Ireland in the aftermath of the Troubles.  For all the political intrigue that gives the novel its foundation, Disappeared focuses on a handful of characters engaged in a quest for the truth.  On a slightly larger scale, it is the story of citizens in a divided country striving to recover from events that tore apart their lives, their families, and their nation.

Oliver Jordan, an IRA member suspected of being a police informant, disappeared in 1989, the presumed victim of a kidnapping and murder.  Seventeen years later, Joseph Devine, a retired legal clerk and former police informant, is murdered.  Father Aiden Fee follows directions to the body and prays for Devine’s soul, as he does for all the informers in his parish who end up dead.  Inspector Celcius Daly, pondering the motive for Devine’s murder, finds himself wondering if the death is connected to the recent disappearance of retired Special Branch undercover agent David Hughes, an elderly man who suffers from dementia.  He finds another connection in the person of Malachy O’Hare, a firebrand solicitor who has made a career of representing IRA members.

The story begins to take shape when the reader learns the unusual circumstances under which Devine’s obituary was published.  The questions that Daly pursues are those that puzzle the reader.  Was Jordan killed because he was an informer or was he, as his widow insists, loyal to the IRA?  What does Jordan’s son, Dermot, know about his father’s past?  Why did Special Branch cover-up the details of Jordan’s disappearance?  What is the significance of Devine’s collection of antique duck decoys, to which the story makes frequent reference?  Are the ghosts that visit Hughes real or imagined?  The questions are answered in a convincing, tightly-plotted story.

While Disappeared has the elements of a mystery, it isn’t much of a detective story.  The novel’s greatest weakness is the information dump that comes as the story nears its conclusion.  The circumstances of Oliver Jordan’s fate are revealed not through detection but in a rambling (and rather improbable) confession that seems to come out of the blue.

To a surprising extent, the novel hinges on information more than emotion.  Despite the human drama that is at the story’s core, I felt detached from it all.  Like Dermot, I had an interest in learning the truth about his father’s disappearance, yet I cared little about the novel’s characters.  A couple of characters who initially appear to be central to the story all but disappear by the novel’s end, while the others failed to resonate with me.

Despite my failure to connect with the story on an emotional level, I enjoyed reading Disappeared.  Anthony Quinn peppers his prose with clever phrases and creates vivid images of the Irish countryside.  The ending is disappointing:  a belated attempt to turn the novel into a thriller is weak, and quite a bit is left unexplained.  When one of the characters tells Daly that he’ll have to live with a bit of uncertainty, that lesson might just as well be directed at the reader.  Notwithstanding those concerns, the engaging plot and colorful prose make Disappeared worth reading.

RECOMMENDED