A Murder of Quality by John le Carré

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"Nobody seems to understand you can't build society overnight. It takes centuries to make a gentleman."

A Murder of Quality (1962), the second novel by John le Carré, was written before his Cold-War spy books that brought him wide international acclaim. And although George Smiley is a protagonist in Murder, it is not a spy story but rather a traditional British murder mystery, a quality murder mystery, to use a lame pun on the title.

The plot revolves around Carne School, a well-known public school (note that in UK "public school" means "exclusive private school"), founded almost 500 years ago by monks and endowed by king Edward VI. One of the school housemasters is celebrating his 30 years at the institution and we are introduced to the dramatis personae - masters and tutors at Carne and their wives. Meanwhile, in London, a Miss Brimley, the editor of a Christian newsletter, receives a letter from Mrs. Rode, wife of one of the Carne masters. Mrs. Rode comes from the family of long-time newsletter subscribers. She asks Miss Brimley to come immediately to Carne as she is convinced her husband is trying to kill her. Miss Brimley, in turn, asks George Smiley, with whom she worked during the war, to go to Carne and help Mrs. Rode. Well, Mr. Smiley arrives too late for help, but not too late to solve the murder with the assistance of the local police inspector Rigby.

There are many clever twists and turns in the plot, a boon for readers who like these devices. The phrase "long nights" appears quite a few times, suggesting a clue. A local transient woman claims she had seen a devil "flying on the wind, his silver wings stretched out behind him." Charity clothing collection for Hungarian refugees is cleverly woven into the plot. I cannot reveal the nature of another strong undercurrent and motif as it would provide a spoiler, but it is masterfully handled by the author.

I have to admit it would be hard to get entranced by the dynamics of plot, which is not a major problem because - in my view - the novel is really about the British class society and its peculiarities as reflected in the education system. Mr. le Carré's writing is first class, on par with the best classical British mysteries. It's hard not to like erudite sentences like

"'The moment of truth in a good meal! Übergangsperiode between entremets and dessert,'[...]"

Characterization of George Smiley is also top-notch and I recognize in him exactly the same personality as in the later books. Yet to me, the novel does not rise to the excellence of The Spy Who Came from the Cold, Smiley's People, or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. However one nice effect of reading A Murder of Quality is that now more than ever I want to re-read those later novels.

Three stars.




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And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


""Humanists [...] try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife."
(From Kurt Vonnegut's address to the American Humanist Association on the occasion of being awarded Humanist of the Year, Portland, Oregon, 1992.)

Over a half a year ago I reviewed here John Tomedi's book Kurt Vonnegut , which did not exactly read like a biography but rather like a collection of serious, almost research-depth essays about the Vonnegut opus. Charles Shields' And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (2011) is a biography proper, and an extremely detailed one. Reading the biography one feels that virtually every month of Kurt Vonnegut's adult life has been documented. Well-written and balanced this is a captivating read and my main complaint is the large volume: 424 pages plus 68 pages of notes and references.

Thanks to Mr. Shields' monumental work I now understand Kurt Vonnegut as a writer a little better and like him as a person perhaps a little less. Since Mr. Shields' research, so richly referenced, seems extremely meticulous and detailed, I have high degree of confidence in his observations. He had the opportunity to work with Mr. Vonnegut on the biography over correspondence for several months and had several in-person conversations with him shortly before the writer's death in 2007.

One does not usually summarize a biography in a review. I am skipping over all the well-known events from Vonnegut's life, such as his service in the US Army in Germany in the waning years of the World War II and the POW period spent in Dresden, housed in a slaughterhouse, during the February 1945 massive bombing by the Allied forces. Of the period 1947 - 1967, when Vonnegut worked as a journalist and a writer for general Electric while publishing several early novels, I found his participation in a creative writing program at the University of Iowa the most interesting.

Vonnegut's breakthrough began in 1967 and fully materialized in 1969 with the publication of his masterpiece - to me one of the best books ever written - Slaughterhouse-Five . The novel arrived in bookstores at the time of the growing anti-Vietnam-war sentiment and perfectly matched the zeitgeist. Mr. Vonnegut became a hippie icon, "and his novels became part of the printed currency of the youth movement." Yet the biographer also points out a growing dissonance between the young readers' image of Vonnegut and the actual persona of a clean-shaven and business-attired writer. The reader may also be interested in Mr. Shields' descriptions of the difficult business of selling a book, even if the book is a masterpiece.

I am unable to refrain from mentioning the famous incident of book burning in the U.S., this Great Land of Freedom of ours.

"[...] in 1973 in Drake, North Dakota [...] a sophomore complained that her English class was reading Slaughterhouse-Five and that it was profane. The school board went into special session and ordered the superintendent to burn all copies of the novel. On a freezing November day, three dozen were shoveled into the school furnace [...]"

The biographer goes into much detail about Kurt Vonnegut's personal life, in my view way too much. The long-lasting yet gradually more and more difficult marriage to Jane Cox is juxtaposed with Vonnegut's turbulent later-life union with Jill Krementz. The biographer does not hide his moral judgments.

I feel a little hurt by Mr. Shields' ridiculing Bluebeard as "an overlong, bumptious treatise on the value of Vonnegut's oeuvre as a writer," as I love the novel and consider it the second best in the oeuvre. But then, what do I know about literature.

Three and three quarter stars.



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Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"The night air was thick and damp. As I drove south along Lake Michigan, I could smell rotting alewives like a faint perfume on the heavy air."

I had read several V.I. Warshawski novels many years ago and quite liked them at the time so I was happy to find the first book in the series, Sara Paretsky's Indemnity Only (1982). Immediately I felt a strong emotional connection with the Chicago setting as it was precisely the year the novel was published that I came to this country from the then martial-law Poland and I lived for a short period of time just a few blocks away from V.I. Warshawski's office. It felt special to read in a fiction book about places such as the Belmont or Addison intersections of Lake Shore Drive where I used to walk every day exactly at the time that the fictitious events took place there.

Ms. Paretsky introduces her famous private eye, V. I. Warshawski, born of a Polish father, a Chicago cop, and an Italian mother. V.I. is a lawyer: she used to work for the Chicago Public Defender's Office; now she's self-employed as a private investigator. She is hired by a vice-president of a large Chicago bank to find his son's girlfriend. Almost immediately after taking the case she finds a dead body.

V.I. does not have much trouble with the police - other than being ordered off the case - as one of the investigating officers is an acquaintance of her deceased father. But the bad guys do not like her meddling: she is assaulted and badly beaten by thugs from the Chicago underworld, and also told to get off the case. Connections emerge to the powerful labor union, The International Brotherhood of Knifegrinders and their pension fund. Even more interestingly, V.I. learns that the missing woman's father is someone whom she met in her childhood, and that the man is now the president of the Knifegrinders union.

The plot is well constructed and interesting if a bit clichéd. Events happen fast: V.I.'s apartment is ransacked; people other than the police are looking for clues in the case. V.I. meets a lawyer from an insurance company that handles the pension funds. Not only does the lawyer help Warshawski with the case but they also have an affair - a thread well written by Ms. Paretsky. Alas the denouement is to me a disappointment - not because it is predictable but because it seems hastily written.

All in all, I can only marginally recommend the novel. I remember liking the later books much more. The portrayal of Lotty Herschel, V.I.'s friend and a feisty and socially conscious doctor, is the best thing in the novel other than immensely likeable and realistically drawn V.I. herself, clever, vulnerable yet full of "female-chismo." Being Polish by birth I can't resist quoting a bad ethnic joke from the novel (so bad that it is funny):

"You know why Polish jokes are so short? [...] So the Germans can remember them."

Two and a half stars.



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The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"Pain was for poor people. [...] Everything to him who has."

It is a challenge to review Bernard Malamud's The Assistant (1957), an acclaimed novel, virtually an "American classic." For instance, Time magazine included it in its list of "100 best English-language novels published since 1923," yet I have been totally unable to appreciate the novel, even if I admire the author's human-centered message. I strongly dislike the writing and the narrative style, and in fact it is difficult for me to even consider this novel a work of literary art.

The story focuses on a Jewish family trying to make a living in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood. Morris Bober, who has owned of a small grocery store for over 20 years, had come to America from tsarist Russia, having escaped pogroms and conscription into the army. The store is barely surviving: the profit is so low that Morris' daughter Helen has to help financially from her own meager salary just to keep the store afloat. When fancy delicatessen opens nearby Morris' "own poor living [is] cut in impossible half." In addition to the continual economic plight the store is held up: the "holdupniks" take hard-earned $10, and Mr. Bober is injured.

Into this story of struggle for survival of an immigrant family's dreams and human dignity, comes 25-year-old Frank Alpine, who has tried and failed to achieve success in the West and is now looking for a job and a future in Brooklyn. Frank falls in love with Helen and stays to help Mr. Bober with the grocery store. The morality tale of love and redemption is superimposed over the story of economic struggle.

A literary text speaks to me only if it is told in a aesthetically distinguished form. In other words, I do not much care about the story itself; all I care about is the way the story is told. While Mr. Malamud's tale is engrossing and realistic I am unable to perceive any beauty or grace in his prose. When I read novels from roughly the same period by, say, Vladimir Nabokov or Patrick White, I am awed by their magnificent prose and inspired by the sophistication of their literary art and richness of stylistic devices. Here, I feel I might as well be reading a newspaper story.

What's more, I do not want the author to tell me what the characters are thinking. I do not want the author to explain the characters' motives. This is for me, a reader, to figure out. A literary work of art is created as a collaboration between the author and the reader, and it is the reader who makes sense of the story. Not only are pages and pages of detailed explanations of characters' actions unneeded, they trivialize the author's message. The novel has a wonderful two-page fragment about Mr. Bober's conversation with a "macher". Fabulous dialogue! And then, the author spoils everything by explaining what all this was supposed to mean. For Heavens' sake: the readers have brains!

Of course, the above critique is relative to my understanding of the essence of literature. It might be my fault that I had to grind my teeth to finish the book despite its resonant message about human suffering and redemption.

One-and-three-quarter stars.



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Switch by William Bayer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"[...] this man was trying to create people as much as to destroy them. [...] He killed them, certainly. But to use the parts his own way. So in a sense we could say he was a creator. Destroyer and also creator."

William Bayer's Switch (1984) is one of the best police procedurals I have ever read. For about half of the novel the author manages to avoid the awful clichés of the genre. Also, he succeeds in setting up the plot in a way that compels the reader to continue reading until the very end, even if the last part of the book is not as impressive as the first.

We meet Lt. Frank Janek at the funeral of his friend, a retired New York detective who has committed suicide. After the funeral the Chief of Detectives hands Janek - who is considered a star detective - a difficult and bizarre case. Two women, a teacher in an exclusive school for girls and a call girl, were killed and their heads have been switched. It takes Janek and his team quite some time to find a connection between the two victims.

Meanwhile Janek is trying to find the reasons for his friend's suicide. As he zeroes on the "switch" killer, further linkage between the two cases emerges. The lieutenant gets romantically involved with Caroline, a successful young photographer who is helping him in the case. Atypically for police procedurals Caroline portrayal is better written than that of Janek himself: she feels a more real person than he does.

The chapter titled Criminal Conversation distinguishes itself with accomplished prose and psychological plausibility. But what I like the most is the growing network of connections between the two cases and between main characters in the plot. The reader will also notice that the title of the novel can be interpreted in multiple ways.

An outstanding procedural! Now I want to read the author's Peregrine, a novel - also featuring Lieutenant Janek - that won the Edgar Award in 1982.

Four stars.





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In Between the Sheets by Ian McEwan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"He stirred his coffee and watched the waitress who leaned against a counter in a trance, and who now drew a long silver thread from her nose. The thread snapped and settled on the end of her forefinger, a colorless pearl."

It is perhaps not surprising that having finished reading Ian McEwan's near-masterpiece On Chesil Beach just a week ago, I have found his collection of short stories In Between the Sheets a bit of a disappointment. It is one of the author's early works (1978) and the pieces read almost as if the author wrote them to practice his literary skills.

There is no common motif or theme in this collection of seven stories. The only commonality seems to be the author's curiosity as to how far can he go with narrative creativity. The first piece, Pornography seems to be the most "normal" of the seven. It is a cautionary tale for men about the dangers of double timing: cheating may be punished. The conclusion is totally hilarious and very painful to read, especially for men, I would imagine.

The second story, Reflections of a Kept Ape is one of my two favorites. Written from the point of view of a non-human, it is offbeat, fresh, and viciously funny as in the sentence (note the usage of the second verb)

"Our first 'time' [...] was a little dogged by misunderstanding largely due to my assumption that we were to proceed a posteriori"

I actively dislike the next piece, Two Fragments: March 199-, a story about a father and his daughter in post-apocalyptic London: not only am I bored with dystopian visions, but this one contains gratuitous "juicy bits" about pigeons' vaginas, dog's member, and chimpanzee excrement.

I find the fourth story, Dead as They Come the best. The narrator details the dynamics of his love affair: everything would be quite typical and probably boring save for one detail - the object of his affection is not animate. The next piece, after which the whole collection is titled is endearingly strange and quite disturbing. I would like it a lot if not for the author's adolescent obsession with effluvia: we read about wet dreams, vomiting, consumption of feces, anal boil, nocturnal emissions, double stream of urine, saliva glinting on a point of tooth, fecal core, and snot. Mr. McEwan was 30 at the time of writing this: this is the stuff of 17-year-old "men."

The penultimate story, To and Fro reads as a sort of chant, a monotonous drone. It is interesting but it is hard to say what it is about. Finally, Psychopolis, which coolly begins with a woman asking the narrator to chain her to the bed, quickly loses its grip on the reader and devolves into a parody of Southern California late 1970s parties. What the story does well is capture the psychotic character of Los Angeles. Using the voice of one of the characters the author utters a phrase that could be the motif of the entire collection:

"The idea, when it works, is to make your laughter stick in your throat."

Yes, the idea would be great, if it worked. Here, it works only some of the time.

Two-and-a-half stars.




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Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"Rebus [...] was feeling like the detective in a cheap thriller, and wished that he could turn to the last page and stop all this confusion, all the death and the madness and the spinning in his ears."

Well, I appreciate the author's self-referentiality. While Knots and Crosses (1987), the first installment in Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus series, is not a cheap thriller, it is not a remarkable one either. About fifteen years ago I read two books in the series and found them moderately interesting and readable so I was curious about the first novel in the sequence. Alas, nothing particularly distinguishes this book. The Rebus series is customarily classified as "Tartan Noir," i.e. a genre of dark procedurals based in Scotland. I am spoiled by Denise Mina's novels, which are better written, more interesting, and - most importantly - not as clichéd as Rankin's works.

We meet Rebus, a Detective Sergeant on the Edinburgh police force, as he visits his father's grave in Fife. He then pays a visit to his brother Michael, a hypnotist who enjoys quite a successful career giving public shows. There is not much closeness between the brothers. Rebus is divorced and his eleven-year-old daughter, Samantha, visits him occasionally. Michael and Sammy end up playing important roles in the story.

Rebus is on the case that has shaken Edinburgh: several young girls have been abducted and strangled, but not sexually abused. The murderer seems to be sending clues to the investigating officers - knots and crosses. Rebus is haunted by his years in the military, particularly by the events that occurred while he was serving in the SAS (Special Air Squadron) unit, and the detective's "inner fragility" is one of the recurring motifs in the story. Another subplot recounts an affair between Rebus and Ms. Templer, a police liaison officer.

When reading the novel I felt that I had encountered the same plot in many other books: the detective with a troubled and traumatic past, the clues offered by the serial murderer, racing against time to save the most recent victim - all of these are common clichés in thrillers. True, Mr. Rankin offers a hard look at Edinburgh's criminal underbelly, and there is some tension in the plot, but the novel is quite far from satisfying the author's ambitions as evidenced by his reference to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Moreover, the denouement is based on a rather cheap plot device and comes as a sort of anticlimax.

Two-and-a-half stars.




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On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"[...] her whole being was in revolt against a prospect of entanglement and flesh."

On Chesil Beach (2007), my third novel by Ian McEwan after Amsterdam and The Child in Time , is the best of the three. Delightfully short, it offers psychological observations with acute realism and dead-on accuracy. An absolute opposite of a feel-good book, it cuts through the superficial pretense, through the thick layers of fictions people create about themselves, and uncovers the underlying bare bones of one's personality. Quite painful to read in several places and impressive in the scope of truth about human nature that it reveals.

The novel has an interesting non-linear structure of its five chapters. The odd-numbered ones describe events happening during the pivotal day of two people's lives, while the even-numbered ones go back in time to give an account of how they reached that fateful day. They eventually merge with the "current" time of Chapter One. The ending of Chapter Five is written from an over-40-years-later perspective and relates the further life trajectories of the characters.

It is summer of 1962: Florence and Edward, freshly wedded at St. Mary's in Oxford, are beginning their honeymoon day and night at a hotel on Chesil Beach on the Dorset Coast of England. Florence is a gifted violinist, the leader of a string quartet; Edward is a graduate student of history. There is not an iota of doubt that they are in love with each other. They are both anxiously anticipating the joys of their future lives together but while Edward is focused on his sexual performance on their initiation night - they have been basically chaste until the wedding - Florence is terrified of the sexual act itself, repulsed by its sheer physicality.

Chapter One, Three, and Five are bravura pieces of writing. The detailed psychological passages about the sexual act - Florence and Edward's deep kiss and the long scene beginning with his touching her inner thigh - are little masterpieces of prose, so painful to read and so true to life. They far, far, far transcend the frivolity of erotica and stupidity of romance. They show how different the boundaries of privacy are for different people and how difficult it is to merge the two "I"'s into a "we," without sacrificing substantial portions of one's identity. And yet there is a ray of hope, as evidenced by the phenomenal passage that begins with

"[...] a mere shadow of a sensation, an almost abstract beginning, as infinitely small as a geometric point that grew to a minuscule smooth-edged speck, and continued to swell."

All that about a lone hair in its follicle. Stunning!

The events happen on the backdrop of the early 1960s, the times of quite rigid social norms, times just before the cultural earthquake of a few years later. An elderly reader such as this reviewer (although he still is about 10 years younger than Florence and Edward) will be able to palpably feel the cultural restrictiveness of these times. This reader also greatly appreciates the references to the music by John Mayall and Alexis Korner as well as to Beethoven's early and late string quartets.

I would have certainly rated the novel with five stars if not for the atrocious last page. Maybe I am too obtuse but to me the last eight sentences of the novel constitute the author's attempt to explain the story and to give the reader suggestions about what it is supposed to mean. I passionately believe that the readers should work it out themselves. That's what great literature is about.

Four and a half stars.




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