Quichotte - Salman Rushdie

 It's the breadth of imagination which hooks us in, the depth of thought and compassion that enthrals.  Salman Rushdie may just be the greatest living novelist in English.  Rushdie, however, lives in America, as do both of the heroes in Quichotte.   I say both because Quichotte (pronounced key-shott) is a double picaresque, blending the journeys of the ageing seller of opioids in his quest for the affections of former Bollywood star, now US talk-show host, Miss Salma R, and his creator, the pseudonymous author 'Sam DuChamp' who is trying to put his family back together before he dies.   Both protagonists were born in India and live in America.   'Sam' has a sister who is a British peer, Quichotte has a half-sister who lives in America; both have survived breast cancer.   Sam has an estranged son who has become embroiled with US Security Agencies.   Quichotte conjures up an imaginary son, whom he names (of course) Sancho.

Before we know it, Sancho (like Pinocchio), has become a real boy.   So real that other people can see and speak with him.   Because Quichotte's picaresque also includes Magic Realism.   One of the towns they pass through is being terrorists by mastodons - technically humans turned into rampaging mastodons, some of whom still walk upright and wear green suits.   It is all brilliantly done, all enthused with empathy and a profound humanity.

Quichotte may not be as celebrated as Midnight's Children nor as controversial as Satanic Verses.   It is nonetheless a mini masterpiece, a triumphant autumnal work brimming with life even as its protagonists consciously face death. 

The Centauri Device - M John Harrison

Suddenly everyone wants Captain John Truck, which is odd, given that nobody has ever wanted him before.   General Alice Gaw of the Israeli army wants him, as does her opposite number with the Arab socialists, and Dr Grishkin, and even Chalice Veronica host of the longest running party in the universe.  Hitherto John Truck and his ship My Ella Speed has had to make do ferrying second rate cargo around the lesser spaceports at the ass-end of the Galaxy.   Now, people are kidnapping him off the street, recusing him and snatching him for their own nefarious purposes.

The thing is, the Opener archeologist Grishkin has found the legendary Centauri Device on Centauri VII, the only planet to have been murdered.   Nobody knows what the Device will do.  The Israelis and the Arabs assume it's a super-weapon that will decide their endless Earth-shattering war.  Grishkin dreams it is a religious revelation, possibly apocalyptic.   Chalice envisages the high of all highs, or at least trading it for a megaload of drugs.   The one thing upon which all agree is that only a Centaurian can operate the Device.   Which is a problem, given the race has been all but exterminated.   Truck is the all-but in question.   His prostitute mother Spaceport Annie coupled with one of the last Centauri and space John is the result.

It's a hell of a take on the Grail Quest - an off-kilter, typically Harrison take - complete with Fisher King 9the aesthetic anarchist Pater) and a Merlin of sorts (Pater's son, the conjurer Himation.   Guinevere has a scarred face and Truck is an unlikely Lancelot.   But he gets there in the end.   He conjoins with the Device and---

I simply cannot get enough of M John Harrison.   This is the third of his novels I've read this year and I want more.   He is so different, so unique.   Nobody does it like him.   Nobody does what he does better.

Engine Summer - John Crowley

 Engine Summer (1979) is a post-apocalyptic coming of age story.   A millennium or more in the future, Rush That Speaks grows up in Little Belaire, a town of truthful speakers.   The Storm has knocked humankind back into the stone age.   They have no writing or literature but pass on history as stories.   Here and there relics and ruins of former glories linger on, regarded as the work of angels and thus unfathomable.   Saints wander the land, spreading insights and speaking of other settlements elsewhere.   Rush That Speaks dreams of becoming a saint when he grows up.

But first he must deal with adolescence and his love for Once a Day, a neighbour belonging to a different cord but taught by the same teacher, Painted Red.   One day members of Dr Boot's List visit Little Belaire, as they do every year, to trade.   Once a Day decides to travel with them, and leaves.   Rush cannot fathom this.   Why would anyone want to leave Little Belaire?   Why would Once a Day leave him?   He expects her to return.   Everyone does.   But she doesn't return.   Finally, he feels he has no choice but to track her down and rescue her.

People have no transport, but believe that Road leads everywhere.   Rush gets distracted by a hermit called Blink, who lives up a tree and hibernates.   Rush had heard Blink called a saint, though Blink flatfly denies any such thing.   Ultimately Rush finds Once a Day in Service City.   The List have different skills and practices.   They lives with large cats and emulate the feline lifestyle.   Once a Day doesn't want to leave so Rush decides to stay with her.   He is assimilated into the List.   Finally, he is taken to meet Dr Boots, and learns his destiny, a revelation that sends him reeling, half-mad.   Visions, hallucinations, insights - until it is revealed who he is telling his story to.

From the very first page it is clear that Rush is speaking to someone other than us.   Every now and then someone asks italicized questions.   There is mention of crystals which seem to be recording what Rush says (recording? we wonder, in a world without machines?).   There are four crystals and each facet is a chapter.   The answer, when it comes, is quite something.

It is a boy speaking, so the style is straightforward and provides a framework in which we learn alongside Rush how to navigate his world.   The half-remembered names of things from Before the Storm is a fun device.   The title for example, try saying it aloud.   Avvenging and avengers took me longer to figure out.   Dr  Boots is best of all.   Rush's tortured pubesence is of course timeless, instantly familiar.   The characters are nicely defined, the locations differentiated.

All in all, an intriguing classic of the post-apocalypse.

The Mobster's Lament - Ray Celestin

 Book Three of the City Blues Quartet, the setting is New York, late 1947.   The mobster in question is Gabriel Levenson, manager of the Copacabana nightspot and fixer of choice for Frank Costello, the boss of all bosses in New York.   Gabriel has been on the take for some time, syphoning off cash to fund his escape from New York.   He has good reason for corruption: he is sole career for his young niece since his sister's suicide and wants to be able to give her a good, mob-free future.   There is also his own skin to be considered.   Swindling Frank Costello is bad enough - but Gabriel's business partner at the Saratoga racetrack is Albert Anastasia, of Murder Inc.   Gabriel has two weeks before his accounts will be presented to both business partners and the deficit will become clear.

Meanwhile, Costello has a job for Gabriel.   The late Benny Seigel, founder of the nightclub scene in Vegas, seems to have raised two million from various senior gangsters to bail out the floundering Flamingo, but the money never made it to his account.   Costello wants Gabriel to find the money.   Gabriel is also keen to find the money, given it's just about the same amount he has syphoned off.   Substitute one for the other and ... who knows?

Gabriel asks around.   Apparently Benny was talking about a jazz type called Gene Cleveland.

Meanwhile there has been an awful killing in a flophouse in Harlem.   A black guy, a white guy and the female deputy manager.   Even the famously corrupt NYPD have no trouble finding a culprit.  He was standing over the bodies clutching a bloody cleaver when they arrived.   He is a young black doctor with a drug habit, called Tom Talbot.   He is now on Riker's Island, being pressed to do a deal by his attorney.

Tom's father Michael is not convinced of his son's guilt.   Michael Talbot is a retired gent from Chicago.  He is also a former cops and former Pinkerton's agent.   He has come to New York to save his son.  He is joined there by his former protegee Ida Parker, a recently widowed private detective with a bureau all her own, who has been head-hunted for a secret but lucrative new job in LA.   But first...     Michael and Ida investigate the crime scene which turns out to have been the room of a black guy now missing.   A jazz type called Gene Cleveland.

That is a basic summary of the beginnings of just one of the plotlines.   There are several others.   Celestin's debut novel was the first of the Quartet yet he has marshalled his storylines with masterly technique.   There are dozens of characters, not all of whom are around for long, yet we never lose track or become confused.   Information is given us piecemeal across 500+ pages, so that the denouement, when it comes, makes perfect sense.   The denouement also happens to be a shootout in the dead of night of the frozen Hudson River, which is prettty damn impressive.

Celestin is great.   I shall be reading more.

The Shroud and the Grail - Noel Currer-Briggs

 I have been fascinated by the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau since Henry Lincoln began his Chronicle series in 1972.   I even read the book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, when it came out in 1982.   I managed to steer well clear of the Dan Brown phenomenon, fortunately, and was able to remain interested if not committed.   Twenty years later, I was reading a fantasy story about magic when I stumbled over a reference to the book by Noel Currer-Briggs.   Was it real, I wondered.   If so, was it available?  Yes to both.

Noel Currer-Briggs (1919-2004) was Yorkshire-born (can't be helped), a scholar, a cryptographer at Bletchley Park during World War II, and a genealogist.   He came to the subject of the grail through Ian Wilson's books on the Turin Shroud, which I have also read.   Currer-Briggs theorised that the grail was the vessel in which the cloths that shrouded Jesus's body were kept after his resurrection.  Specifically these are the Shroud itself, now in Turin, and the face cloth which was destroyed during the French Revolution but has been recorded in countless artworks as the generally accepted face of Christ.

Currer-Briggs' aim in this book was to work out where the Shroud had been since first being seen by western eyes in Constantinople during the First Crusade, and ending up in the possession of the dethroned king of Italy, who gave it to Turin cathedral for safekeeping.   Genealogy is his tool.   He argues that the Templars spirited it away from Constantinople when the city was looted during the Third Crusade, took it to Germany, then on to France where the Templars had their western HQ.   When the Templars were suppressed in 1307 it then passed into the keeping of one particular family with extensive Templar links drawn ever tighter as their descendants married into other Templar families.   Ultimately it passed to the House of Savoy, which became the royal house of Italy.

It's all intriguing and adds to the fascination.   What I don't entirely get is how one school of thought is that the Grail was a chalice, another a bowl, when (according to Currer-Briggs) it was in fact a flat wooden box.   On the plus side, despite living in East Midlands, I had never heard of the Nottinghamshire alabaster carvings that profess to be of John the Baptist's severed head but which make much more sense as references to Christ's Resurrection. 

Essential reading, then, for those like me who are fascinated by the arcane.

Palm Beach Finland = Antti Tuomainen

 What do you get when you cross Carl Hiaasen with gloomy old Finland, land of a hell of a lot of water?  Come on, clue's in the title...   Yep, Palm Beach Finland.   It really is as simple as that,

The concept is brutally simple, but the execution is really good.   OK, it's not as funny as the Poet Laureate of Florida in his Nineties heyday, but it's a lot funnier than Hiaasen has been since the Millennium.   The plotting is involved but never ridiculously so, and the characters are all well-drawn and likeable.   Which, given that one of them is a Helsinki hitman, is no mean feat.

The set-up really is that everyone has a dream.   Jorma Lievo has a vision of (like it says in the title) Palm Beach, only in Finland.  The heat is less oppressive, there is no tide for surfing, but otherwise...   Jorma has built it, giving the chalets the names of characters from Miami Vice.   It will take off in time, especially if he can expand.  But expansion is blocked by a ramshackle property which Olivia Koski has just inherited.   Olivia has been away in the big city, with poor-quality men who have drained her financially and emotionally.   Her dream is to restore the family home, starting with the plumbing, which is going to be expensive.  Jorma Lievo, meanwhile, wants her out as cheaply as possible.   The cheapest possible method is to pay two deadbeats on his payroll, Chico and Robin, to conduct a campaign of low-key nuisance.   They start by heaving a brick through Olivia's window.   The brick hits a burglar who comes at the pair with an electric blender.   Struggling, they accidentally break his neck.   The local police get nowhere with their investigation, so Helsinki sends in undercover Jan Nyman.   Meanwhile the hitman, Holma, receives bad news: his half-brother, the sibling he didn't know he had until recently, has been inexplicably murdered in a place inexplicably called Palm Beach Finland.   OK, Antero was a nut-job and a nuisance, but blood is blood...

I enjoyed Palm Beach Finland thoroughly and will happily read anything else by Tuomainen that I come across.   It's not life-changing, nor does it pretend to be.   Honest entertainment, deftly done.