North River, by Pete Hamill
This was the best fiction I read last year. I first came to appreciate Hamill's creative and narrative gifts when I read "Snow in August," and here he proves again his talent for making a time and place live in the reader's imagination. In 1930's New York, an Irish-American doctor, abandoned by his depressed wife, discovers that his estranged daughter has left his baby grandson in his care. He hires an Italian immigrant woman as nanny, and goes about his rounds, attending to the physical and emotional needs of his working class neighborhood by the North River, haunted all the while by questions surrounding his wife's disappearance: has she run away, or has she committed suicide?
The fantastic miracle in "Snow in August" is not repeated here. The miracle in "North River" is of the more common variety: as life goes on, bonds grow among the doctor, the nanny, and the baby boy, creating a family nurtured by love and the sacred ordinary.
Although this story could essentially be set anywhere, anytime, Hamill's evocative prose makes the reader believe, and fervently wish, that it really all happened then, in the 1930's, and there, by the North River in New York City.
The Spies of Warsaw, by Alan Furst
Furst writes a wonderful series set in World War II and the years leading up to it. There are no recurring characters, but the theme is the same: ordinary people are thrust into circumstances requiring heroic choices that endanger their lives. In this novel, it is the winter and spring of 1938, and a French officer, a decorated veteran of the First World War, is assigned to the French embassy in Warsaw, where he and his counterparts in other nation's embassies spy on each other and especially the Germans. He is confronted with the plight of a Jewish married couple, delegates from Russia, who have been called home to certain death in one of Stalin's infamous purges. He runs a dangerous operation to get them safely to Paris. Just fifteen months later, of course, the Nazis overran Poland, and the reader cannot help but wonder what happened to the people in this story. But that's the poignancy of each of Furst's novels: there are no epilogs, just characters living in their time, doing what they can to prevent or disrupt a Nazi hegemony over Europe.
Death Comes for the Fat Man, by Reginald Hill
Nobody, but nobody, writes as well as Hill. This is the British mystery series featuring Andy Dalziel, the obnoxious and overbearing and, somehow, lovable Superintendant, and his sidekick, the more refined and educated Peter Pascoe. Andy has been severely wounded in a terrorist bombing, and hovers dramatically and hilariously between life and death throughout the story, while Peter must investigate and discover the villains. Hill's mysteries are intriguingly plotted, but that's not really the point. The enjoyment for this reader is the delicious use of language, the fun that Hill has with vocabulary and wordplay. English is his instrument, and he plays it like Yo Yo Ma at the cello. Prodigiously.
The Last Temptation; The Mermaid's Singing; The Torment of Others; The Wire in the Blood, by Val McDermid
It doesn't often happen that one discovers an author by seeing a movie or television series; it's usually the other way around. But last spring I began watching the two-hour episodes under the series title, "Wire in the Blood," on the BBC Channel. I was hooked by the first one I saw, noticed in the credits that the series is based on books by Val McDermid, and simply had to read her. These are psychological thriller mysteries, and not for the faint of heart. Dr. Tony Hill (played by Robson Green in the series--curiously attractive!), is a psychological profiler attached to the Bradford CID in northern England. He and his team pursue deviously clever, but seriously deranged, serial killers. Hill's disadvantage is that many of the rank and file are skeptical of his specialty; his dubious advantage is that he can put himself into the mind of his prey, forming an empathetic bond that inflicts a terrible mental torture.
I realized that I came into the television series in the 4th or 5th season, so I'm now frantically looking for the earlier ones I missed. Thank the library gods for ILL!
The Painter of Battles, by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Perez-Reverte is probably more famous for his delightful series featuring the daring escapades of 16th century Captain Alatriste. This book is set in present day. A solitary man lives in a tower high above the Spanish coast. There, he is painting a mural around the inner circular wall: a mural depicting the horrors of wars throughout history. This painting emphasizes the brutality of death, not the glory of battles and famous heroes. A disaffected war photographer, he has profited from a series of books featuring his photos. Haunted by the wartime death of his colleague and lover, he paints to exorcize the demons that possess him, especially his memories--in Africa, the Middle East, and Serbia--of getting the picture rather than saving a life. A Croatian man who was the subject of one of his most famous, prize-winning photos, has stalked him to confront him with this question: "How did the photograph change your life?" It has obviously affected this man's life--tracked down by the Serbs, he was tortured and left with no family or country. He tells the painter that he has come to kill him. Their subsequent conversations, their subtle dance of thrust and parry, of accusation and acceptance, are deeply unsettling.
Careless in Red, by Elizabeth George
I've been a faithful reader of George's Thomas Lynley mysteries over the years, but lately she has really strained my loyalty. The first books were fascinating, tightly-plotted puzzles, with interesting back stories for the main characters. I eagerly followed the developments in their lives as much as I followed the mysteries. About four books ago, I began to feel uncomfortable at the level of angst experienced by each main character, and at what I perceived to be the secondary role of the mystery in each book.
I realize that "too much sunshine makes a desert," but isn't the reverse also true? There is no let-up to the agony. It seems to me that drama--even tragic drama--is enhanced by lighter, comedic moments. Here we have Tommy, desperately trying to cope with a tragic loss, walking the coast of Cornwall in an effort to numb his pain. He finds a body on the beach and gets drawn against his will back into detection. I figured out pretty quickly "whodunit," but worse, I didn't care. There is not one likeable character in this book, always excepting Tommy's partner Barbara Havers; they snarl and snipe at each other, and suffer--I almost wrote "untold," but that's the problem, it's told to excess--psychological and emotional problems, and we're treated to all their inner thoughts as they work through them. George has a sense of humor; every now and then she lets a character get in a zinger. But this series has descended into bathos, and now is little more than a novelistic soap opera. Only great reviews will entice me to read the next installment.
Next: non-fiction read in 2008.
