Satori - Don Winslow

 Back in 1979 Rodney William Whitaker (1935-2005) wrote Shibumi, a spy novel, under his best-known pseudonym Trevanian.   In 2011 Don Winslow, author of The Cartel, wrote Satori, which is a prequel to Shibumi.   I am a die-hard fan of Winslow and am fascinated by Trevanian (see my review on this blog of his spoof spy novel The Loo Sanction).   I had to read Satori.

Trevanian's hero, Nicholai Hel, is a retired assassin.   Winslow's story, set more than a quarter century earlier, is why he retired.   Hel is the son of an exiled Russian aristocrat, born in Shanghai in 1925 who masters the game of Go under a Japanese master, who also happens to be a general in the Japanese army that invaded China in the Thirties.   After the Japanese surrender in 1945 Kishikawa is tried for war crimes.   Nicholai, who has also become a master of the Naked Kill, visits him in prison and, at the general's own request, murders him, for which he too is imprisoned and tortured.   Ultimately he is freed and recruited by the US Intelligence Service. in October 1951.

They embroil him in a complex plot to smuggle rocket launchers to the communist insurgents in Vietnam in the hope of preventing American involvement in the coming war.   In return Nicholai gets a new life plus the names of those who tortured him.   An added bonus is that the Rushian spy chief he gets to hoodwink and ultimately kill, is the man who seduced his mother and stole the family fortune.

It's all great fun, very cleverly plotted and of course beautifully written.   I love the way Winslow has a voice for each strand of his fiction whilst never losing the narrative force of simplicity.   I got lost in the later sections of the book, knowing absolutely nothing about the geography of south Asia, but I was always entertained and the concluding battle was highly sarisfactory.

The Weight of the Dead - Brian Hodge

 A novelette, a work of fiction longer than a short story, shorter than a novella, typically between seven and seventeen thousand words: that is what Brian Hodge has written here.   It turns out to be the perfect length.   Less would have been inadequate, more would have been padding.   It is a form I really must experiment with myself.

The Weight of the Dead is not post-apocalyptic, it is post-frazzle.   Within living memory the Day the Sun Roared caused a power surge which burned out all electrics, instantly turning the Technological World into what survivors called the World Ago.   Without tech or transport humankind reverted to nomadic lifestyles.   A generation later they began to settle into fortified villages, like the one Melody Banks lives in.   Melody is fourteen; the male of the species is being to notice her.   One such, Ted Harkin, became inappropriate, causing Melody's father Grady to beat his brains out.   Now Grady must pay the price.

The villagers are not barbarians.   They do not have the death penalty.   Instead, Grady Banks must bear the weight of his crime - literally.   Harkin's corpse is fastened to him and he is banished into the woods outside the defences until such time as his burden is lifted, either by death or putrefaction.  Obviously Melody can go out and visit, take her father food and necessary supplies, but she cannot take anything that might free him of Ted's corpse.

The woods are not entirely safe.   Myths and rumours have already evolved about the people who wander out there and what they might have become...

A really skilful, beautifully written and controlled, example of short weird fiction.

3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years - John Scalzi

 Continuing the theme from my last post, 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years, is not a novelette, it is a longish short story.   John Scalzi is an award winning American novelist.

The theme here is time travel, which has become a reality in the not-so-distant future.   This future is a continuation of our world, so naturally it has become commercialised.   Cost of the tech makes it an elite luxury, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime experience for others.   Our unnamed narrator is (apparently) the man who works the machine.

Scalzi takes the time to outline the process and its rules.   There are two chambers and two doors, one in, one out.   Customers go out to their chosen time, and come back a second later through the other door.   It is a second in our time but in theirs it has been either 3 days, 9 months, or 27 years.   These are the 'resonances' that have been found to work best.   It doesn't matter if they interact with their younger selves or successfully intervene in the assassination of JFK (the traditional rules of time travel fiction) because the moment they arrive in the past an alternate reality has been created, which then continues.   They can travel to any time in the past, near or distant, so long as it is longer than 27 years ago.   They cannot travel forward in time.   That is impossible because the future doesn't yet exist.   That is the official line.  But of course it is possible...

It is amazing how many ideas Scalzi gets into such a short work whilst carefully avoiding techno-babble or pontificting.   This is a thought-provoking read with a really effective twist.   I'm very impressed.

A Cold Wind from Moscow - Rory Clements

 The latest in the Tom Wilde series, A Cold Wind from Moscow is a particular rich example of what is best in a long-running series.   Time has moved on (to 1947 and the UK's coldest recorded winter), characters have developed and changed (Philip Eaton has apparently been outed as a 'useful idiot' for Stalin's Soviets) and new characters have stepped forward to take their place.   Freya Bentall, for example, is the de facto boss of MI5, albeit the former police gangbuster Percy Sillitoe is the nominal chief.   She asks Professor Wilde to take a short break from his university duties to try and identify which of three MI5 agents is possibly a double.   Meanwhile Uncle Joe Stalin has personal instructed his 'black work' specialist Lazar Lukin to go to the UK and stir up chaos in order to shield their prime nuclear asset Klaus Fuchs who, as Clement neatly points out, was the man who built the nuclear bombs of America, Britain and Russia.   Among Lukin's alloted tasks is the elimination of another veteran of Los Alamos, Basil Rheinhaus.   Reinhaus is a brilliant scientist with a gambling problem, which led Fuchs to try and recruit him as a Russian asset.   Reinhaus, however, preferred to report Fuchs to MI5 and is now in hiding.   One of Tom's suspects is Reinhaus' contact man.   He takes Wilde to an arty event at the home of the super-rich socialite Vivienne Chalke, at which Wilde recognises Reinhaus.   Then all hell breaks loose.

And, I almost forgot, the novel opens with the murder by ice axe of another MI5 agent in Tom's set at college.

A Cold Wind from Moscow is the best of the Wilde novels I have read to date.   Several of the supporting characters are superb, Vivienne Chalke for instance, and East End ice-axe man Terry Adnams.   Tom's wife Lydia is training to be a doctor at St Ursula's in London and I missed her dry wit, and I didn't take to the young woman the Wildes have drafted in to look after their young son.   Other than that, I found only one misjudgement on Clements' part: there is an unnecessary appearance by three of the actual Cambridge spies in the epilogue.   Why?   Unless, of course, that is our clue as to what comes next in the series?   We shall see.

The Strings are False - Louis MacNeice

 An Unfinished Autobiography is the subtitle and something of an understatement.   A Scarcely Begun Autobiography would be more accurate.   What it is, in detail, is a conflation of two manuscripts left with his friend E R Dodds in 1941 (when MacNeice was only 34) and not touched again until after MacNeice's death in 1963.   It is then padded out with another account by MacNeice of his childhood and an essay by John Hilton who knew him well at school and university.

There is thus nothing about MacNeice's innovative and important radio plays, virtually nothing about his writing or his close association with W H Auden and Stephen Spender.   The other member of the circle, Cecil Day Lewis, only merits a single line in The Strings are False; it as if MacNeice barely knew him.   Indeed, why anyone who seems determined to say nothing revelatory about himself or his emotional life should want to even start an autobiography defeats me.   His divorce - his wife ran off to America with their lodger, leaving MacNeice to bring up their year-old son alone - warrants only slightly more detail than Day-Lewis.   He doesn't bother to tell us the lodger's actual name (Charles Katzmann).

That said, this is all there is - the only personal writing MacNeice ever did.   Before the war (the time I am reseaching) MacNeice seems to have been the perpetual absentee in literary circles - always somewhere else - but nevertheless making a name for himself as poet and lecturer.   If you want to know about Auden in the Thirties (and again, I do) you have to read The Strings are False.   If you have to read The Strings are False, it helps to know quite about poetry of the 1930s and MacNeice's place in it.

Blacktop Wasteland - S A Cosby

 I picked this up by chance in my local library - and what a treat it turned out to be!   I recently lost a week trying to cme to terms with William Faulkner's Absolom, Absolum (great writing but the action pushed so far back I simply couldn't engage).   Blacktop Wasteland is set in a similar landscape but seen from a very different viewpoint.

To start with, the majority of characters are (like the author) black.   Beauregard 'Bug' Montage learnt how to be a wheelman from his long-vanished father Ant.   Indeed he served a manslaughter sentence in youth detention for running down a bunch of crooks threatening to kill Ant.   Now he runs an auto repair shop in Red Hill with his cousin Kelvin and lives in a double-wide with his wife Kia and two boys.   But he still has the car he did the killing with and races it sometimes in outlaw muscle-car drags.

A rival repair shop has opened up in town.   Beauregard's business takes a hit.   Debts are mounting.   Then Ronnie Sessions turns up with a diamond heist for which he needs the best possible wheelman, which is Bug.   Everyone knows Ronnie Sessions is white trash.   He still owes Bug for the last job they did together.   But Bug is desperate for ready cash.   One big score will clear all his problems and allow him to refurbish his shop and thus see off the competition.   And it turns out the hit is much bigger than anyone thought.   Problem is, the jewelry store that held it was a front for mob moneylaundering.

The standout element of Blacktop Wasteland is the way Cosby handles the driving action.   He takes us all the way into Bug's mind as he's doing it, the rational decision-making process and the visceral thrill alongside.   We speed with Bug.   We become totally invested in the outcome.   Despite the brutality, the unsparing treatment of the ripples which spread out from his illegal actions, we want him to win.

Blacktop Wasteland is no mean debut.   I'm looking out for Cosby's next.