Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (22 page)

A Time Gone By

by William Heffernan

Akashic, 290 pages, paperback, 2005

Back in 1945, Jake Downing was a rookie NYPD cop – fast-tracked as a homicide detective because of a leg injury received at Pearl Harbor that saw him discharged from the army – when Judge Wallace Reed was murdered. A prominent Democrat marked for future glory by his party, a highly respected judicial figure, married to an astonishingly beautiful and much younger wife, Judge Reed seemed to have everything to live for. As Downing and his vastly more experienced partner, Jimmy Finn, started digging, pressure was built upon them by the city's political boss, Manny Troy, to opt for the easy solution – that Reed was murdered by a small-time gangster, Louie Grosso, who was intent on stopping the judge from bringing Grosso to richly deserved justice.

The truth, of course, was much more complicated than that – this is, after all, neo-noir. Behind the benign, reputable mask of the dead man, the two cops soon discovered, lurked a corrupt sadist who was involved in all sorts of sleazy manipulations and who brutalized his young wife. They quickly found, also, that the cut-and-dried evidence against Grosso had been manufactured, and clumsily manufactured at that. Matters were complicated by the unmourning widow, Cynthia – Cyn – Reed, the
femme fatale
of the piece, who swiftly enmeshed the young Jake Downing in her wiles and bedsheets. At last, and after many intricacies, the two cops yielded to the pressure and permitted Grosso to go to the electric chair for the crime he didn't commit, consoling themselves with the knowledge that he was certainly guilty of a half-dozen other, Mob-related murders.

But twenty years later Jake, now Chief of Detectives Downing – a position he owes in part to his acquiescence to political "reality" two decades before – decides to reopen the case. Fighting against new pressures to let the dead past simply stay buried, he enlists the retired Jimmy Finn and Jake's own lover, an assistant coroner, to revisit old territory, painfully reliving his torrid affair with the ambiguous Cyn Reed.

This book triumphs on many different levels. One is its evocation of the genuine noir spirit. Fittingly, even the good guys are not exactly spotless, as Jimmy Finn engaged in habitual police brutality (along with most of the rest of the 1940s NYPD) and Jake's affair with Cyn was not only adulterous but conducted while Jake's wife was in the final stages of pregnancy with their first child. The out-and-out bad guys are of course sleazebags of the scummiest kind; a second of Heffernan's skills is in the brilliant creation of ghastly characters like Manny Troy, union leader and mobster Owney Ryan, and Cyn's petty-hoodlum brother Oliver. After an extended encounter with any of them one finds oneself desperately yearning for a shower. Cyn herself, as befits a
femme fatale
figure, has a murky past that her public veneer of respectability insufficiently covers. A third success of the author's is in the creation of genuine ethical problems Jake must face during his later investigation that go far beyond the crime itself and his part in the cover-up.

Deliciously convoluted and neatly written (I especially liked the use of first- and third-person narratives to distinguish the 1940s and 1970s Jake Downings),
A Time Gone By
is a top-notch piece of work.

—Crescent Blues

Empty Cities of the Full Moon

by Howard V. Hendrix

Ace, 441 pages, hardback, 2001

Not too many years in our future, scientists researching into immortality – or at least extreme life-prolongation – investigate the possibilities of prionoids. ("I think of a prion as a protein whose altered shape is contagious to other proteins," explains one of the characters early on. "Sort of like a cross between the games of Go and dominoes. Each protein, once altered, can now alter the shape of those other protein molecules it was itself originally shaped like. A cascade effect.") Because treatment with prionoids can have beneficial effects on certain mental illnesses, it is not difficult to find "volunteers" among the clients of charitable institutions dealing with the poverty-stricken of the streets.

However, at around the same time, though at first seemingly unconnected, there is a sudden, disturbing but apparently harmless craze for rhythmic drumming and dancing. This craze spreads like wildfire, and it slowly dawns on all concerned that it is less a fashion than some sort of psychological infection. More, some of those infected begin to display other symptoms, such as "somnia" – the converse of
in
somnia – whereby people fall asleep for very protracted periods of frenziedly REM-rich sleep, the while displaying religiously rooted (not necessarily Christian) stigmata. Most dramatic of the symptoms, however, is a temporary transition into animal form – into various were-creatures.

The end result of all this is a pandemic that kills about 98% of the Earth's human population, many of the scant remainder being shapeshifters/were-creatures.

That's the beginning of one main strand of this book.

The other main strand, intertwined with the first, is set some thirty years later, when Christopher Spires – an industrialist who played a large part in the prionoid-based research into promoting longevity – has gathered a goodly percentage of the non-were population into a colony in the Bahamas, conferring upon his adherents the longevity treatment. The people of this colony seem to have an arcadian existence, troubled only occasionally by attacks from without by the envious shapeshifters, whose life expectancy is short. Another problem is that the best and the brightest of the colonists tend to become defectors ("abjurers"), rejecting the rule of Spires and the longevity treatments alike and willingly accepting exile in order to continue their own researches into the
exact
cause of the pandemic.

Naturally, our focus of interest is on various of the abjurers as they travel around the devastated American South in search of each other and the answers to their many questions.

Playing a part in both strands, and complicating them yet further, is Johnny Drisan, a space pilot suddenly snatched from an alternate universe into this one.

This is not a novel that is easy to synopsize – indeed, it's extremely difficult to do so, or even to follow exactly what is going on while one's reading it. One of the reasons will already be evident: it is jam-packed full of ideas and plot elements – normally something creditworthy in an sf novel but here done at the expense of readability and character development. Of the 30+ chapters, most begin with extended infodumps or back-stories that on occasion occupy 50% or more of the chapter's length; on one occasion only the final page or so of the chapter concerned actually contains any action that advances the plot. This can be intellectually exciting – and on occasion it is – but it does make
Empty Cities of the Full Moon
somewhat less than
involving
: once you've put the book down at the end of a session, there's no great emotional incentive to pick it up again, no pressing need to find out what happens next. In short, for all its fine intellectual qualities,
Empty Cities of the Full Moon
suffers from an emotional aridity that very nearly defeats its whole purpose as a novel.

Yet some of the intellectual excitements should not be underestimated. Here, for example, is a very lovely quasi-scientific model, as described by one of the more enigmatic characters, of psi:

If you analyze the waves of even the ordinary ocean of water, you'll find that they're information-rich. As long as a wave pattern persists, it can tell you about the passage of ships, wind direction, shoreline effects, lots of things. Boats, for instance, don't just make waves as they pass through the water – they're also rocked by the waves they themselves pass through, which includes the wakes of other vessels. The ocean interconnects the motion[s] of all vessels on its surface... . [S]o too the quantum ocean interconnects the motion[s] of events that occur in space and time. The quantum ocean functions as a holographic field, encoding the particulars of the motion[s] of events and transmitting those particulars to "inform" the motion[s] of other events... . The information in the quantum ocean is holographic – distributed and simultaneously available at multiple locations. Propagation of the holographic wave patterns is essentially instantaneous because they are
scalar
waves: longitudinally propagating waves of information rather than force. Fluctuations below the energy threshold of particle-pair creation... . Look at the branches above us [of the trees among which the characters are strolling] and think of the whole canopy as a "green brain". Think of the branches as dendrites. In the brain there are an awful lot of branching dendrites – far more than the leaves of this tree. Those dendrites release ions, and each of those ions is a tiny electric field vector. There are ten billion neurons in the brain, each with an average of twenty thousand connections. Action potentials within the neural nets are
significantly
affected by the scalar topology of the quantum ocean – much the way the gentlest of breezes from the ocean of air affects the leaves of this tree. Our cerebral hemispheres act as specialized scalar interferometers, responding to the presence of scalar waves much the way the leaves of this tree respond to that gentle breeze ...

A friend once said, deliberately self-deprecatingly, of a story that likewise suffered the coagulative effect of a surfeit of complicated ideas: "I have a very small mind, and this story is simply too big to fit into it." Reading
Empty Cities of the Full Moon
I felt exactly the same way. I am certain this is an exceptionally good book; but I believe it fails at what it set out to do, which was to be a good
novel
. To repeat, it offers intellectual stimulation galore – but the same could be said of something like Hawking's
A Brief History of Time
, which no one in their right minds would describe as a good novel, or any kind of novel at all. Where
Empty Cities of the Full Moon
falls down, or indeed apart, is in the matter of
story
: the plethora of ideas and expositions effectively kills the storytelling and all its usual appurtenances, like (as noted) emotional drive and involvement with the characters. Three-quarters of the way through the book I was
still
getting mixed up between the two major female characters, Trillia and Tomoko, despite the fact that they are described as different in every conceivable way (aside from gender) and serve entirely different functions in the convoluted plot.

If you seek a science-fiction novel that presents a fearsome intellectual challenge – a chess match against a Grand Master – then
Empty Cities of the Full Moon
may very well be the book for you. However, if it's a
novel
you're after, then you'd probably be better to look elsewhere.

—Infinity Plus

A Season for the Dead

by David Hewson

Delacorte, 400 pages, hardback, 2004

and

Lucifer's Shadow

by David Hewson

Delacorte, 384 pages, hardback, 2004

There are plenty of good reasons not to read
The Da Vinci Code
, and here are two of them. The similarities with Dan Brown's international bestseller are not in fact too great, but both of these books by Hewson concern ancient and modern conspiracies, one of them is centred on shenanigans within the Catholic Church, and so on. Both are in strict point of fact mystery novels, but both so far transcend any genre considerations – and are so beautifully, lovingly written – that they demand serious attention as mainstream literary novels. Arriving in quick succession here for review, they together offered this reviewer what was probably his most rewarding reading experience of 2004.

A Season for the Dead
opens with a spectacular scene in the Vatican Reading Room. Professor Sara Farnese is trying to work there when a gun-brandishing fellow professor, Stefano Rinaldi, appears and proceeds to unfold in front of her a recently flayed human skin. Before he can explain too much to her, he is shot dead as a dangerous madman by an over-zealous Swiss Guard. Soon afterward, the discovery is made in a nearby church of a pair of mutilated corpses.

The Vatican does its best to divert the investigation mounted by the Roman police, but reckons without the cop called in to straddle the sensitive line between the two jurisdictions. That cop is young Nic Costa, a delightful mixture of aesthetic connoisseur and unreconstructed macho Italian male who probably gets his doggedness from his gritty father, a major figure in the old-time Italian Communist setup. While the bodies pile up and senior Vatican figures do everything in their power to alter accepted reality in the hope that Nic will either run down the blind alleys they temptingly open for him or allow his palm to be greased, his probing slowly zeroes in on the activities of a privately disgraced American cardinal, Michael Denney.

A far greater distraction to Nic's investigation is offered by Sara Farnese, who likewise seems central to the conspiracy in that many of the dead have been her lovers. Much of the emotional dynamic of the novel's plot concerns Nic's attempts to reconcile his strong attraction – both physical and, more important, personal – to the professor with the progressive revelation of the full extent of her astonishingly prolific sex life. He must learn to accept that the woman with whom he has fallen in love is the person she
is
, not the person he might have wanted the love of his life to be.

There is much of the feel of John Fowles's
The Magus
to Hewson's
A Season for the Dead
, as various
eminences grises
attempt to bamboozle him with smoke and mirrors, and the sense of thwarted eroticism, which Hewson handles with exquisite delicacy, has an echo not just of that novel but also the same author's
The French Lieutenant's Woman
. Hewson, like Fowles, is concerned not just with the overt mystery, the mystery of the plot's events, but also with deeper, less tangible mysteries that his hero – and perhaps the reader – will perhaps never fully solve. How, for example, does Caravaggio, the 16th-/17th-century murderer-painter with whose life and works Nic is near-obsessed, fit into the tapestry of present-day murders and conspiracies?

The second of these two novels,
Lucifer's Shadow
, again has some similarities with
The Magus
. Young Daniel Forster is hired from England to Venice to catalogue the library of a private collector ... or, at least, that's why he
thinks
he has been employed. It soon becomes clear to him that there are undercurrents of motivation at play among his employer's intimate circle, but it will be a long time before Daniel – and ourselves – can discover what is truly going on. The term "god game" has been used to describe fictions whose protagonists are in effect being manipulated, unknown to them, by the invisible strings of covert puppeteers around them. In
Lucifer's Shadow
Daniel is the innocent victim of a god game.

But are the puppeteers benign or malicious? This cannot be known without the telling of a parallel story. In 1733 young Lorenzo Scacchi, ancestor of Daniel's enigmatic employer, comes to Venice to find himself likewise ensnared in a god game ... and also in love, love with a beautiful composer whose work can never be publicly recognized because of her double disqualification in being both a woman and a Jew. Yet there is at least the possibility that Rebecca's masterpiece might be performed, so that it can receive the public acclaim it deserves, even if she cannot be acknowledged as its composer; and a conspiracy to that end is mounted involving not just Lorenzo and Rebecca but also the great showman-conductor-composer Vivaldi. But one of the conspiracy's architects has, unknown to anyone else, a quite different agenda – a murderous one.

The two tales of murder and conspiracy, separated by the best part of three centuries, are complexly – and masterfully – intertwined, and both are populated by quite exquisitely realized characters. Both stories are complicated in themselves, presenting mysteries whose development becomes only gradually apparent; but the true, overarching mystery can be understood only by the solution of both tales.

A Season for the Dead
and
Lucifer's Shadow
are each a mightily impressive achievement. Reading either one alone offers a delicious feast at both emotional and intellectual levels. Reading the two novels one soon after the other might almost create a sensory overload ... Ah, but what a delicious overload it is.

—Crescent Blues