Book Review: Mister, Mister

  By Guy Gunaratne

• Pub Date: 2023

• Genre: Literature, Fictional Memoir

• Where I bought this book: Barnes & Nobel, Florence, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I liked his first novel about growing up in Birmingham  

 ******

 

   When Yahya Bas, British subject, Islamic poet -- and thus suspected terrorist -- awakes in an isolated jail cell, a policeman is there to take his statement. Bas refuses to say anything. Instead, he cuts out his tongue, preferring to write his story. 

    That is this book.

    It's a memoir, a political statement, a tale of growing up poor and out of place -- both culturally and geographically -- in the West Midlands of England.

    It's a wonderful tale from a poet, a suspected terrorist, and a literary phenom. He's tired of being bullied, suspected, and deceived. 

    "I just want you to listen," he says early in the tale. "I have plenty to say."

    So he writes his story, from his birth to a Muslim family that is only partially his own. His mother is around, but she has mental issues and stays alone in her room. So Yahya is mothered by a group of women, all of whom live in the dilapidate building with his uncle, Sisi Gamal, his teacher, mentor, and sometimes tormentor.

    He winds up attending a Muslim school, where he meets up with a group of friends, exploring Britain's treatment of the world, including his Islamic culture. He is profound, literate, angry. He studies all manner of writings, from the poets of ancient Egypt, Syria, and other parts of the Middle East, to the European scribes of the Middle Ages and onward.

    Soon, Yehya starts writing poetry. It is profane and bitter. He takes the name Al-Bayn, a nod to his culture, an ancient Greek or Celtic name for Britain, and the mystic world of William Blake. He becomes famous in his own community, attracting large crowds and disruptions. The authorities, fearful of his writings and his impact, see him as a threat.

     So he flees and wanders, eventually finding himself in the desert world of his ancestors. In his voluntary exile, he find his own heritage lovely if uncomfortable, difficult if welcoming. He find acceptance, but pushes away, and his return to England is not as voluntary as his leaving. 

    Yet no matter where he goes, he finds himself a nomad, an outsider. He has a lot to say, but he struggles with what it means. We struggle along with him.

Book Review: The Ministry of Time

 By Kaliane Bradley

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Fantasy, time travel

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Newport, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: The idea of time -- and time travel -- fascinates me  

 *****

    I love the concept of this book -- bringing people from the past into the present -- but its execution was, shall we say, a bit disjointed.

    It has a lot going for it. The writing is decent, with flashes of brilliance. The characters for the most part are diverse and well rounded. Their biographical backgrounds -- and more than one is actually taken from the pages of history -- are compelling.

    Our hero and narrator, who is not named for the bulk of the novel, is an Asian Englishwoman working in the British civil service. She was born in Cambodia and lived through the Khmer Rouge takeover and genocide, survived and moved with her family to the UK and now lives in London. As the book begins, she finds her new job is part of a time travel experiment. Various people from other eras of the British Empire will be brought into the 21st Century. She will be a bridge to help them acclimate to the current time.

    The newcomers will be called expats, rather than refugees, the latter being considered an unflattering term. Our hero, a refugee herself and currently an expert on languages, has mixed feeling about the issue.

    The book never delves into how the theorical impossibility of time travel is overcome. It simply posits that it was found sometime in the future, and the British appropriated the discovery to the current time and place. Precautions are taken to ensure the past is not changed; they are simply bringing people from previous times into the present. "Removing them from the past ought not to impact the future."

    Still, the book is written on various timelines, which can be confusing.

    Anyway, let's start with the good parts: The writing is stunning at times,  including lines like these:

            * "Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions."

            * "My mother ... had witnessed the sort of horrors that changed the way screams sounded."

            * "The wind shook me like a beetle in a matchbox." -- A line I so want to believe is a reference to Melanie's song, Alexander Beetle.

     The book explores the themes of people out of their elements and trying to fit in, often comparing it to the experiences of immigrants and refugees. How they are treated -- as a curiosity, savage, naive or incompetent -- is a constant element.

    There's a story in there that explains what happened, but it's so tangled it's sometime hard to decipher. The author throws in a romance and potential crimes of the past and future. As we move into the climax, it attains the elements of a thriller, as good guys and bad guys (and who are all these people?) battle to take control of whatever needs to be taken control of.

    Yet within that, that actions sometimes grinds to a halt and we are subjected to philosophical meanderings about what it all means.

    So go ahead and enjoy the writing and the story. Just don't try to hard to understand it all.

Book Review: The God of Endings

 By Jacqueline Holland

• Pub Date: 2023

• Genre: Fantasy

• Where I bought this book: Bookmatters, Milford, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: It is a debut novel, and stories of immortality intrigue me   

 ******

         We give immortality to our gods, because they are perfect. We grant immortality to our book characters, because they are not.

    Collette LeSange is far from perfect. And she assuredly does not like her immortality. She did not ask for it, and her years on earth -- full of pain and loss, despair, failed hope, and taunts from the gods -- have not been friendly. She isn't living, she thinks, just existing.

    And as modern society grows around her, she's finding it harder to hide -- and to eat. Because Collette is a vampire, she must feed on blood, which gets more difficult to find as her years mount up.

    Holland's debut novel tells us how Collette gained immortality, her life over the next 150 or so years, and the fears that engulf her and remain constant companions.

    It's an audacious tale, full of adventure and sadness. It's a life writ large, and as much as Colette tries, she find it impossible to ignore the larger world. All too often, we find that her attempts to exude compassion and kindness rarely end well. 

    Collette grew up the daughter of a gravestone carver in the America of the early 19th Century, before her grandfather chose immortality for her -- a sore spot with her. She soon made it to Europe, where she met and was kept by others of her kind. But angry gods and angry mortals decried what they saw as her wickedness, so she was forced to wander alone and live apart from the vremenie -- those who live short lives -- for most of her days.

    Now, in the early 1980s, she is living and working in America as the owner of and only teacher at an elite pre-school. She senses the gods -- Czerobog* and Belobog, the former the god of darkness, destruction, and woe; the latter the god of light, life, and good fortune (the pair also may be just two faces of one god) -- have something planned for her. 

    In successive chapters, Holland alternates between Collette's history and struggles through the years and her current saga, which includes her growing relationship with a young artistic student with a troubled family life.

    The book has a few problems: Parts of it are overwritten, both stylistically and in the telling. Over-description is rampant, and some of the storylines could have been parsed or omitted.

    But it's a wide-ranging epic, and the ageless protagonist allows Holland to tell a tale over centuries of human history through the eyes of a single women, who is caring and strong, if also confused and lonely. It's overall a good read, depressing at times, but with a texture of hope that threads its way through some of the worst actions of humanity.

___________________________________

    *He's also called the God of Endings, hence the title.

Book Review: Call Me Cassandra

 

• Author: Marcial Gala 

• Translator: Anna Kushner

• Where I bought this book: The Strand, New York City

• Why I bought this book: The author's character says he is literally Cassandra

*******

      Mixing ancient Greek myths with recent Cuban history, this slim volume (just 211 pages) packs in history, culture, and literature.

1. It features Cassandra, one of the best known mythological characters.
2. It's historical fiction from the mid 1970s, an era rarely covered.
3. It was originally written in a foreign language and has an international theme.
4. The story's plot includes several Greek gods and goddesses, including Athena, Aphrodite, and Zeus, whom the main character refers to as "father Zeus" and "Zeus who reigns on Olympus," among other epithets.
5. It's a literary masterpiece, entwinning visions of Greek mythology with escapism and anti-war fervor, and transgenderism with patriotism and finding oneself. It blends death and re-birth by metaphor, allusion, and complexity.

    But that complexity, and a writing style that rambles in and out of the past, present, and future, from dreams to reality to apparitions, make it a difficult read. Parts of the book also include disturbing descriptions of abuse, including sexual abuse. 

    Raúl Iriarte is a young man growing up in revolutionary Cuba, in the small town of Cienfuegos, with an abusive father, a depressed mother, and a dead aunt. He's small, thin, light-skinned, and blond,  likes to read, and is regularly bullied at school. He likes to dress as a woman, which his mother encourages because he resembles her dead sister. He knows he is the reincarnation of Cassandra, and has the same gift of prophecy as she did. But he tell no one the latter, because, well, he's Cassandra.

    As he turns 18, he's sent off with the Cuban forces to intervene in the civil war in Angola. There, he is maligned and abused because of his looks, his effeminate natures, and his perceived homosexuality. 

    A key scene in the book is a Cassandra narration about the troops cleaning their weapons and singing a corrido, a Mexican ballet that commemorates a tragic event.

Then they move on to I'm leaving your county, and they finish with the part that goes goodbye, lady, / goodbye forever, goodbye. I'm listening to them from here, Zeus, from the earth where I lie, dust among the dust. That corrido has been with me since we were getting ready to disembark in Angola. It was our true national anthem. We sang it when we were able to score some rum, or high-proof alcohol, and if we couldn't score, we sang it, and now, under the African sun, where we are already aware of what it means to be at war, what it is to shiver feverishly with a thirst that won't go away, what it is to carry fear the size of an enormous house, we sing it now too.

     It sums up the tangled relationship of emotions, fears and contradictions of the characters. Emotions about family. Fears about the future and one's place in society. Contradictions about country and patriotism. 

    From the Achaeans invading Ilios because of a perceived slight from a member of its ruling family, to the Cubans meddling in the internal affairs of Angola, Raúl/Cassandra melds past and present, self and society, and existence and displacement into one provocative book.

Book Review: The Curator

  By Owen King

• Pub Date: 2023 

• Where I bought this book: The Novel Neighbor, Webster Groves, Mo. 

• Why I bought this book: I liked King's work in Sleeping Beauties

********

    King has written the rare novel -- one that is multi-layered, complicated, yet eminently comprehensive and readable.

    It has a weird setting in distant time and place but one that's vaguely familiar -- reminiscent of Victorian England, with a few Dickensian characters thrown in for good measure.

    They live in a city on a sea that sounds much like many places in our world.* The land has its succession of kings and wars, its poverty and wealth, and its exploitation of both. There's revolution in the air amidst the magic. And there's those odd cats.

    But while the when and where is left unnamed, we know it's not in our area of the universe. The first sign is the description of a solar system with a sun and 11 planets. The second is the double moon.

Callisto sometimes expressed concern
about the presentation of cats in the book

    The novel is long, and takes a while to get going. But once it does, it's a fast moving page turner. We learn there's been some type of uprising of the poor against the rich; the government has been overthrown but is hanging on up north; a temporary group has taken power and is trying to keep things running, but people's daily lives have changed little.

       The story focuses on several people caught up in the aftermath, who are trying to keep up as strange, fantastical things happen around them. They are unclear about what is happening, and so are we. It's either magical, led by a secretive unknown group, or simply the will of the omniscient cats.

"And when we die, if we've been decent, and if we've been good to the little ones here" -- the man gestured at the cats languidly picking their way over the rocky ground -- "there's a Big One, the Grand Mother. She comes long an picks us up by our scruff, like we were her own young ones. ... She takes us to where it's soft an warm an the milk runs forever an She protects us."

    Near the tail-end of the book, King pens an explanation, such as it is, for much of what has happened. It's not all encompassing, but it helps. It explains who the characters are and what they represent. It also explains the power and authority of the cats.

    Well, for the most part. But they are still cats, and still inscrutable.

_________________________________

    *King gives a wonderfully detailed description of the city, and the book has some fine illustrations by Kathleen Jennings, but alas, no map. I've said this before and I'll say it again here -- every book could be made better with a map.

Book Review: The Ghosts of Belfast

 By Stuart Neville

• Pub Date: 2009 in Great Britain; 2023 in the United States

• Where I bought this book: The Novel Neighbor, Webster Groves, Mo. 

• Why I bought this book: It is a rare find -- a contemporary novel about Northern Ireland

*******

 

  Gerry Fegan is a republican hero in Catholic West Belfast -- during The Troubles he was responsible for a dozen sectarian killings of cops, loyalist paramilitaries, British soldiers, and ordinary civilians. He quietly served 12 years in prison before being pardoned and released as part of the Good Friday Agreement.

    Now, a decade after that agreement was signed, he's seeing ghosts. 

    Literally.

    The spirits of the people he killed want him to kill again. He tries to drink them away, but they stick around. He tries to reason with them, but it does no good. He's beginning to gain a second reputation, as a drunk who talks to the wind.

    But the ghosts are clear in what they want -- the deaths of the men who ordered Fegan to kill, men who are now seen as players, politicians and peacemakers. But to the ghosts, they are cold, hard men who lived violently and killed without remorse. Their justification was Ireland's cause, and their petty power.

    So Fegan obeys them and does his duty, which he has always seen himself as doing. The hard men quickly figure out who's now killing them, and move to protect their new, respectable standings. 

    This was Neville's first book, and the native of County Armagh is now known as the "king of Belfast noir." But this is a violent, unsentimental book, full of bombings and shootings and beatings. It's sometimes hard to read, but it's well worth it.

    The Ghosts ... portray The Troubles as vicious time, and its volunteers and leaders mostly as criminal thugs who used "Ireland's Cause" as an excuse to torture and slaughter their enemies.

Book Review: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

  By Shehan Karunatilake

• Pub Date: 2022

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Point Books, Newport, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: The title, and it won the 2022 Booker Prize, which is always a good sign

******

    

 

   Even the dead in Sri Lanka continue to fight its wars, but only the ghosts see the irony in having the same enemies as the living. 

    This is one ghost's story of his country, which he loves, hates, and everything in between. As part of the living, he thought he was trying to change the wrongs, but his involvement failed to make anything better. He's not ever sure what better would have been -- because he sees the factions, parties, and terrorists as equal opportunity killers -- in life and after. 

    Maali is in the afterlife as the story opens, but remembers little about how he died -- or was killed, which he also suspects. He has seven moons to find out, and he spends the time reviewing and justifying his life, and the country's violent ways. 

    It's hard to determine his many roles in the violence, which surrounds him in death as it did in life. Because he is the narrator of this tale -- in both his ghostly self and as the main actors in his flashbacks -- he has a bias to make himself look good and the various sects who are the warmakers look bad.

    He's a photographer and a gambler, a journalist and a "fixer," who brings together outside reporters and members of the various militias, the military, the police, and the government men. 

    He's a gay man in a homophobic country, dating the son of one of its top officials. So his voice is sometimes self-suppressed -- and sometimes loudly outspoken and self-conscious.

    He's also wryly cynical and morbidly funny. He refers to the dead wandering the streets as a combination of the various gods and goddesses from the Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian religions that are part of Sri Lanka. He calls others the Cannibal Uncle, the Atheist Ghoul, the Dead Child Soldier, and the suicides -- and wonders if they could collectively be known as "an overdose of suicides."

Outside in the waiting room, there is wailing. (A police officer) walks outside to console the weeping woman. He does so by pulling out his baton and asking a constable to remove her.

     The switching from Maali's past as a living being, to his current state as a ghostly presence, can sometimes be confusing. And the story also questions whether we are the same person, the same soul, as we move from life to death -- and perhaps, back to life again.

Book Review: The Wordy Shipmates

•  Author: Sarah Vowell
• Pub Date: 2008

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth, Norwood, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: I heard the author on NPR once, and she seemed amazing 

*******

    You might not think that a history book exploring the lives of some of the earliest immigrants to the United States -- the somber Puritans who came to Boston in the 1600s because the religious figures in England were not strict enough -- would make for a witty, rollicking tale of adventure and petty in-fighting.

    But you would be wrong.

    Vowell's tale, complete with the letters and journals of the men -- and the few women -- who made an impact on the Massachusetts Bay Colony, is a joy to read. It's history come alive, as reported by a somewhat snarky, knowledgeable reporter who, with a wry grin sadly shakes her head at the goings on.

    She brings in popular culture -- from the Brady Bunch to Bruce Springsteen, to Thanks, an oddball situation comedy that lasted six episodes in 1999 -- to help show how we've gotten it all wrong and entirely misunderstand the point of the first English colonists and their relationships with each other and the native culture. When one of them, John Winthrop, spoke about building a "city on a hill," they also missed the point, much like candidate Ronald Reagan misinterpreted Winthrop and Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. in 1984.    

In the U.S.A., we want to sing the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues.

      So, Vowell aims to set us straight. Chockful of primary sources, she covers the Puritans' voyage from their leaving of England in 1630 to their first years in what they called New England. The title is acknowledgement that the Puritans weren't stuffy, ignorant people, (well, they tended to be stuffy, but ...) but serious men and women who knew their religion, had a specific interpretation of their Bible, and could argue and explain exactly what they wanted and why. Along with fighting evil and burning Indians, they wrote and collected books and created colleges of learning.

    And they did it their way.

Book Review: The Chronicles of Kazam series

 

• The Last Dragonslayer (2010), The Song of the Quarkbeast (2011), The Eye of Zoltar (2014), and The Great Troll War (2021)
• Author: Jasper Fforde
• Where I bought these books: Various book sellers over the years; bookshop.org for the finale 
• Why I bought these books: Fforde is an inventive and witty writer. "Quark," said the Quarkbeast

    

********

    I recently noticed that the subtitle of The Great Troll War is A Last Dragonslayer Novel. So maybe the use of the indefinite article means it's not the end, like we are all led to believe? Maybe, just maybe, there is room in the future for more tales about Jennifer Strange, the Kazam Mystical Arts, and the Ununited Kingdoms? 

    We can only hope. 

    It was a joy for me to read this Young Adult series -- and I am a person to whom the term decidedly does not apply. The series has all the attributes of the Jasper Fforde oeuvre -- the imaginative yet cerebral tales of fantasy highlighted by clever and bantering dialogue.    

    Okay, he sometimes gets carried away, but it's all in great fun. He gives us a sardonic view of authority, farcical side tales, and whimsical if grounded characters.

    Take this series, for instance, set in the Ununited Kingdoms, a place similar to Great Britain in an alternative dimension. It is a land where trolls -- 25-feet tall, the tattooed characters eat humans and consider them vermin -- are confined to the northern tier, and the Kingdoms routinely go to war with them, and routinely lose. 

    In Fforde world, this accomplishes several things: It allows the various kings, moptopps, dukes, potentates, and other inept rulers to have an enemy to blame for their failures, test out their new war toys, and provide more orphans who are the key to their society.

    Oh yes, there are dragons, quarkbeasts, tralfamosaurs, and other magically created beasts. And while magic is on the decline, it remains useful for things such as repairing bridges and the like.

    Enter Jennifer Strange, whom we first meet in the first book at age 15 when her orphanage apprenticeship has her going to work for Kazam Mystical Arts Management -- and who ends up running the place, despite her lack of magical skills.

   Fast forward through three books while she does her duty, and we learn more about the skills of this irreverent and brilliant character.

The Great Troll War with my breakfast*

    In this long-delayed fourth book, The Great Troll War, the trolls have taken over and surrounded most of the Kingdoms, creating Greater Trollvania. They are on the verge of invading the Kingdom of Hereford, where Jennifer and her magical friends live, but have been stopped at the border by a ditch filled with buttons (it's one of their few fears; so is a certain shade of cerulean). 

    Jennifer must somehow fix this problem. Her army includes a dozen spoiled princesses and two teenaged dragons. Along the way she negotiates with Molly, a troll who cannot eat her because she is part of the 6.67 percent of vegetarian trolls. (Keep that math in mind. It's important.) (Also, because there are quarkbeasts, physics may be involved. But just a little.)

    So, that's the plot, more or less. I may have explained some things improperly, but it's sometimes hard to keep track of everything in the Ununited Kingdoms. But it sure is amusing to try. 

                _______________________________________  

*Tea and scones play a role in the books as a treat or snack. Particularly at the Globe, "a late-night scone bar . . . that served top-quality scones until the clotted cream ran out or a fight started."

Book Review: The Three-Body Problem

• Author: Cixin Liu 

• Translator: Ken Liu

• Where I bought this book: The Book Loft, Columbus, Ohio

• Why I bought this book: The title spoke to me, and in retrospect, the cover is cool

*****

     In the end, I think I'm just not smart enough to read this book.

   

    There is some serious science in here, and much of it is over my head, even though I have read and understand the concepts of astrophysics.

    My first concern was chapter 17, which described how a group without access to mechanical computation solved a complicated calculation by building a human computer. Literally. It used 30 million people to stand in for the inner workings: the hardware, the motherboard, and the other elements that mimicked the zero-one method of computer calculation. It sounds fascinating, but I'm not sure I understood how it happened.

    Then, in another section, it works on solving a problem by creating artificial intelligence, which in turn could force a proton to shrink from 11 dimensions to two -- and why three could not work. Again, a brilliant idea in theory, but far above my understanding.

    Like its science, the novel is complicated. It's difficult. It poses existential questions within a closed political system. 

    Now beware of this review. A spoiler alert is coming up. Fair warning -- even though it will be hidden, and you don't have to click on the link.

    Author Liu spends a lot of time introducing the characters and setting the scenes, in many different, confusing ways. The story is set in China, and we know something momentous is going to happen. Something, indeed, is happening, but we don't know what.

    The author -- and his excellent translator, who gives insight into the Chinese mindset at the time of the novel's setting -- provide us with a lot of hints. The three-body problem, perhaps, is a planet system with three stars, Or moons. Or planets. (Understanding how three bodies in space stay in a stable orbit is a pressing problem in physics.) Or it's about earth. Or it's a video games. Or it's aliens. War may be involved. Heck, even religion seems to come into play.

    OK. I can't resist. Spoiler alert    

    Meanwhile, deep in rural China, something else is going on. It's secret, and because we are in the period of the cultural revolution, it's a big secret that people will kill and die for. Or maybe they won't. Like I said, it's a secret.

    If this all sounds very confusing, that's because it is. Complicating matters is that the  characters are Chinese, with Chinese names and backstories. (For a native English reader, with a limited knowledge of the culture and history of China, it's difficult to relate to.) 

    And it jumps around in places and times. It doesn't tell a linear story. We learn about various characters over the spans of their lives.

    

    Still, once you start to figure out who is who and what may be going on, you'll find those characters are an interesting group, and their motives, once revealed, make sense. The story does come together with a (mostly) logical explanation in the end.

    But, of course, it is the first book in a trilogy. So my last question is whether I am smart enough -- or dumb enough -- to delve into the next two.

Book Review

 New York, My Village, by Uwem Akpan

• Where I bought this book: The Book Loft, Columbus, Ohio
• Why I bought this book: It has a map

****

    My indelable memory of the Biafran War is the Catholic Charities "relief campaign" that used pictures of starving African children with bloated stomachs to raise money.

 

   That's it. I knew nothing about the reasons for the war, or even where in Africa Biafra was.

    So I was hoping this book would help me learn just a little bit about the war, and just as important, what happened and what is happening now. 

    It kinda did. But it also taught me the war has a long background, involves colonization and other crimes committed on the African peoples, and pretty much boils down to why any war is fought -- hatred, discrimination, jealously, and control.

    Briefly, and I hope I get this right: Biafra is a small province in the south of Nigeria. Northern Nigerian tribes, particularly the Hausa-Fulani, dominated. In 1967, representatives of the Igbo tribe in southern Nigeria, based in Biafra, claimed they controlled the south and proclaimed their independence.

    It did not go well. There's a reason you don't hear of Biafra anymore. It's no longer a country, and hasn't been since 1970.

    In this fictionalized account, Ekong Udousoro is a book editor, and he receives a fellowship to intern at a small publishing company in New York City. He is part of the Annang, who also lives in southern Nigeria, but have had little control to the dominant Igbo. Or as Ekong puts it, his group is a minority within a minoiry. 

    This book is an account of his months learning the book publishing industry, coupled with memories of the war -- which actually happened before he was born, but which has shaped his family, his village, and himself.

    But it's also about his family relationships -- which are confusing; his troubles and joys adapting to living in Hell's Kitchen -- ugh! far too much information on bedbugs and his problems with them; his relationships with his landlord, the man he is subletting his apartment from; the racism he confronts on the job and in book publishing; his difficulties getting along with his new neighbors, and much, much more.

    It's really too much. He covers too many issues, confusing us on many occassions, and spends far too much time on the damn bedbugs. (And even when you think he is done with that, they come back! I was ready to toss the book across the room at this point.)

    Still, at its heart, the book's theme is about how we complicate our lives by dividing ourselves in too many groups -- by color, ethnicity, religion, jobs, community, and so much more. In short, perhaps we are all minorities of a minority.    

Book Review: Days Without End

 Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry

    At one point in reading this painful novel, I was thinking of putting it aside forever. But I ploughed through, and eventually, it was worth it. But beware this is a depressing, violent, and traumatic book. 

    The plot, such as it is, is secondary to the descriptions of the scenes and the settings. And while the writing is evocative, it can be incessant at times. And some of those vivid descriptions deal with long passages about slogging through rain, snow and mud, or with hatred, fear, and slaughter. 

    The voice telling us all this comes from the main character and protagonist, one Thomas McNulty. He is a remarkable person to tell this story of the wild west, the Civil War, and the attempted genocide of the Native population. He is an Irish immigrant whose family died in the Great Hunger, a soldier, and a gay man who is gender fluid. He enjoys dressing as a woman, for a job, in the theater, and in his personal life. His loving relationship with John Cole, another male character, is a constant throughout the book.

    Barry gives McNulty a voice in the style of an uneducated person of the mid-19th Century. He uses language, terms, and expresses ideas that likely were common for the time, although considered offensive, if not derogatory and unacceptable, today. Yet, the gay love and transgender issues are treated in a matter-of-fact manner. While the two men often hide their love from others, they are sometimes accepted as a couple. In a passage late in the book, McNulty describes how he is comfortable with being gender fluid.

I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of a woman and wake with the same. I don't foresee no time where this ain't true no more. Maybe I was born a man and growing into a woman.

    The story follows Thomas, or Thomasina, from about the time he is 12 when he and his partner, often called Handsome John Cole, run away from their orphanage and set out to explore the country. They get jobs as female dancers in a mining town, which is otherwise without women. It's not a sexual thing, but about companionship, and it is an enjoyable experience for Thomasina.

    The pair then join the cavalry. This is where the book bogs down. Pages and entire chapters are dedicated to their travels and travails though the mountainous west, the intricacies and politics of army life, and the murder and dehumanization that occurs during the Indian Wars.

    Then we read similar tedious descriptions about the battles of the Civil War.

    Eventually, John Cole, Thomas, sometimes as Thomasina, and a Native child they have adopted settle in Tennessee with an old Army buddy and a few others. But even that life does not go smoothly, and there are more long-winded tales of unpleasantness.

    But for the most part, it is a satisfying ending worth getting to.

Book Review: The Elephant of Belfast

The Elephant of Belfast, by S. Kirk Walsh

    Amid the bombs and destruction of life during World War II, a young Northern Irish woman tries to preserve what she can.

    Her family is troubled; her few friends are floundering, and her job as a part-time zoo worker is underwhelming. So Hettie Quin tries to save a young elephant from suffering as mankind wreaks havoc.

    It's a fine book, with a decent if depressing story, but just a tad bit overwritten. Some of Walsh's passages go on far too long, with an amount detail that simply does not add to the tale. 

    But Walsh captures pre-war Belfast -- already an old industrial city split between its Protestant and Catholic citizens -- as it crumbles before our eyes. Hettie tries to save the city's soul partly by saving her small part of it.

    

    Her life is a mess. Her beloved older sister recently died in childbirth. Her mother has fallen in a deep depression; her father has abandoned the clan, and her brother-in-law is finding solace in joining the IRA. At 20, Hettie is thinking of her own future -- trying to escape the Irish pressure to get married and start a family. She wants a job, but also find herself attracted to a co-worker and her brother-in-law. A female co-worker urges her to live out her dreams, but also to spruce herself up to find a man.

    Meanwhile, the German bombs are falling on the ciy's docks and industrial center, near the zoo and Hettie's home. The Protestant half of the city curses the Germans, while many in the Catholic neighborhood see an opening in the English-German war to re-unite the long conflict for Irish freedom and unity. Hettie, again, is caught in the middle -- while she is Protestant, her sister married a Catholic, and thus her in-laws and her infant niece are Catholic.

    But her key struggle is to save the young elephant that recently came to the zoo, and is in danger. Neighbors who live near the zee fear the bombing might allow the animals to escape and threaten their lives.

    Walsh captures Hettie as a confused but kind woman, dealing with her own issues while her neighborhood contends with the ancient Irish Troubes and her city with its very survival. 

Book Review: Shade

 Shade, by Neil Jordan

    A ghost who sticks around to relive and review her life is the focus of this novel that reads like a movie script.

    Not that it is lines of dialogue. But the writing -- the descriptions, the settings and shifting of scenes, the lengthy thoughts and soliloquies -- shows Jordan's background as a playwright and screen-writer.

    As you get into the book, you can almost see the images on a screen.  It's a commendable style, but its takes a while to get used to. 

    Jordan shifts the narration from character to character, sometimes jumping around in time, other times telling simultaneous stories from different perspectives. The characters may be in different places at different times in their lives, with the alternate stories overlapping.

    As a movie or play, one might follow along without fail. But as a novel, it can be confusing because when a new story begins or returns, it's difficult to tell who is speaking and whose tale is being told. An unseen narrator simply begins.

    When we first meet Nina Hardy, she had just been killed by a childhood friend, who cut off her head with a pair of garden shears and dumped her body in a cistern. (None of this is a spoiler; it's all told in the opening pages.) She exists as a spirit, able to return to various points in her life and witness the days she lived, and able watch her friends and family in a new light.

    We see her loving father and unhappy mother. We meet her small group of friends -- the half-brother she first met as a young teenager, the strange but sensitive boy who wound up killing her, and that youth's small and relatively inconsequential sister.

    Nina's early years are set in rural County Louth, along the River Boyne, in an Ireland torn between Catholic and Protestant, with the desire for independence amidst loyalty to the king. It continues through World War I and beyond.

    Their stories jump around in time and space in the early going, and while the tales continue to meander at times, they eventually join to form a cohesive narrative. It's a about loss, and love, and family. It's about war and peace. It's about independence and loyalty. 

    It's about friendships, and saving lives, and avenging death.   

Book Review: Flight or Fright

Flight or Fright, edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent

    In 1963, the Twilight Zone aired an episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which an airplane passenger, played by William Shatner, saw a gremlin tearing off part of the wing. Some 20 years later,  Twilight Zone: The Movie remade the episode, this time starring John Lithgow as the passenger.

    Flash forward to TV 16 years later, when Lithgow was starring in "Third Rock From the Sun," a show about an alien visiting earth. In one episode, his boss, The Big Giant Head, played by Shatner, came to visit, thus rendering one of the best inside jokes ever on the networks.

    The Big Giant Head was asked how his trip went. His response: "Horrifying at first. I looked out the window and I saw something on the side of the plane." To which Lithgow's character responded in horror, "The same thing happened to me!"

    You can read that original story, first published in 1961 by Richard Matheson, in this uneven anthology of airplane horror stories. It ranges from a brief 19th Century story by Ambrose Bierce, to a tale of envisioned "Air Jungles" above 30,000 feet written in 1913 by Sir Arther Conan Doyle (yes, the Sherlock Holmes writer) to a 2018 tale of being on an airplane when the world ends, by Joe Hill.

    I know many people dislike short stories, but I think they hold a place of honor. A good one is hard to write -- with a few words and fewer character, a writer must tell a tale with a grab-you-by-the-neck beginning, a now-sit-there-and-listen middle, and a see-I-told-you ending. This book has some of those, but a fair amount of WTF stories that leave you empty, and a couple of tales that never get off the ground.

    There are some out-and-out horror tales, some that are more wild imaginings, and a couple of hang-on-for-dear-life adventures. One of the best is a simple detective story, with an opening that pulls you in, a middle that keeps you wondering, and an ending that is satisfying and believable. It doesn't lead you around in circles, but tell the story and gets to the point like a good short story should.

    As an added bonus, you get to read a new tale by Stephen King, a good one that reaches into the supernatural heights, but makes you wonder just how much of what he writes is true.

Book Review: Little Red Chairs

The Little Red Chairs, by Edna O'Brien

A foreigner, handsome and debonair, moves to small-town Ireland.

Now, Dr. Vlad is a bit strange, who portrays himself as a philosopher, a poet, and a sage. He seems eager to open the natives up to a new world. Soon -- to at least one lonely woman -- he becomes a companion and, eventually, a lover.

But then he is outed as a monster. For Dr. Vlad is not the refugee from Eastern Europe that he claims. He is not a victim but a war criminal, who led the torture and slaughter of thousands of his people.

None of the preceeding is a spoiler -- it's all there in the blurbs for the book. Indeed, the title relates to a piece of performance art that lined up 11,541 little red chairs to symbolize the 11,541 people who were killed in the Seige of Sarajevo in 1992. (Indeed, Dr. Vlad closely resembles Radovan Karadzic -- the Serbian president during the Bosnian war, who was convicted of war crimes.)

During his own war-crimes trial, there is this passage about Dr. Vlad and his delusions:

Sarajevo was his adopted city, the city he loved, and every shell that fell there hurt him personally, As he looked out towards his muted audience, he was like a man on the brink of his own creation.

This is quite a confounding book. On the one hand, it is lovely -- exquisitely written, capturing the voices of the meglomaniac and his enablers, along with the fears and dreams of the Irish villagers. O'Brien shows how hatred and division can be both universal and invisible. Despair and hope co-exist. Compassion, madness, and evil make their appearances.

But some parts literally make you cringe. She describes some brutally gruesome scenes of horror from both the past -- and the present -- as the result of Dr. Vlad's followers and henchmen. These descriptions are so explicit that I cannot imagine how she wrote them.

I do not think they are needed to provide one with the horror of the war and its atrocities, and including them make the book almost unreadable. Indeed, in two places, I saw what was coming and managed to skip over them.

Book Review: Girl in the Picture

The Girl in the Picture, by Denise Chong

For many of us of a certain age, it is the defining picture of the Vietnam War: several children, followed by soldiers, fleeing down a road. In the middle, a young girl, naked, her arms held out from her body, crying, with a look of absolute fear and pain on her face, running with them.

Her name was Kim Phuc, and we now know that she and her family were running from a napalm attack on her village in South Vietnam. Soldiers from South Vietnam, at the behest of the United States, had dropped napalm during an attack meant to clear out Viet Cong guerrillas. But the napalm missed its target in the nearby woods, and instead landed directly on the village full of women and children.

This is the story of the aftermath: How the war affected people in Kim's village, and in greater Vietnam. How the war -- and specifically the attack on Kim's body -- affected her life.

Kim and her family suffered. She suffered from the injuries of the burning, from the literal and metaphorical scars it left. (As described in the book, napalm is a horrible tool of war. It's a burning gel that sticks to the body, and attempts to pull it off just spread it around.) Meanwhile, her family's successful eating establishment was destroyed by taxes and fees the new communist regime in Hanoi enacted, and by the incompetence and greed of corrupt local officials who demand more and more.

Meanwhile, the government began to use Kim's story as propaganda. It forced her to interrupt her studies -- she at one point dreamed of becoming a doctor to help people -- and otherwise exerted control over her life and her decisions. And while the government sent Kim abroad -- to Russia, to East Germany, to Cuba -- it always kept a close eye on her.

Written 10 years ago, this remains is a wonderful, insightful book. It introduces us to another culture, and explains the differences between people from the north and those from the south. It's a great help to Americans, who, says author Chong, all-too-often see Vietnam not as a country, but as a war.

Book Review: Say Nothing

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, 

by Patrick Radden Keefe

    The Irish keep a reputation for having a touch of the Blarney, but those from the North tend to be a wee bit more reticent. This is where "the tight gag of place" takes over, as the poet Seamus Heaney puts it.

Patrick Radden Keefe

Where to be saved you only must save face

And whatever you say, you say nothing

    Patrick Radden Keefe explores this phenomenon, along with the North's reputation for minimizing what they euphemistically call "The Troubles." This description held for more than 30 years, despite people being dragged from their homes and beaten or shot to death, and despite more than 3,000 casualties from the late 1960s into the 1990s.

    His book begins with a tale epitomizing this duality: The abduction of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10. As her children look on, she is taken from her Belfast flat in 1973, kidnapped and shot. Her body is buried, and is not found until 2003.

    We don't immediately know what happened to her.

    Keefe delves into the murder, its background, and the history and social order of the communities in which it took place. What comes out is a descriptive narrative of The Troubles, especially from the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican perspective.

    Keefe acknowledges his book is not a comprehensive account, because it omits the Protestant/Loyalist viewpoint, and focuses on IRA activity, violence, and politics. But this is OK, because Irish Republicanism and its fight for independence has always been the driving force behind the Irish civil rights movements, and the resulting violence from both sides.

    I know the history of The Troubles and have family and friends from Northern Ireland on both sides of the dispute. But this book hit home in presenting just how pervasive the violence was, and how instinctive the battle for Irish freedom is. Indeed, that is the heart of the book.

    Keefe investigates McConville's disappearance and murder by interviewing dozens of people involved in The Troubles, and reading about and piercing together their stories. He gets a jump start after learning of an oral history project, whose records were kept at Boston College. Originally, the project planners pledged to ensure those who participated  -- both IRA men and women and those from the Loyalist paramilitary organizations -- secrecy and anonymity until they were dead. But that idea fell apart when the Police Service of Northern Ireland got wind of the project and served warrants seeking information on the murders of McConville and similar people known as "the disappeared."

    I originally thought Keefe had used the oral interviews for his book. But no; most of them were subsequently destroyed. Keefe actually did the legwork and interviews himself, tracking down family members of the victims, including McConville's children, and those who volunteered for the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries.

    But one key figure refused to speak with Keefe: Gerry Adams, the longtime president of Sinn Fein, often described as the political wing of the IRA. For various reasons, Adams long has denied being a member of the IRA, a statement few actually believe.

    Keefe is harshly critical of Adams, blaming him for ordering the murder of McConville, claiming she was a British informant. Adams has denied having anything to do with her death.

    Keefe's also criticizes Adams for adamantly denying that he ever was a member of the IRA, whose volunteers were committed soldiers in a war, killing or sending men to die for love of country. Adams then turned around and negotiated a peace agreement that maintained the status quo, Keefe writes. Thus, he left those soldiers with neither the peace of mind of having their efforts validated, nor the comfort of acknowledging their commitment. In essence, Keefe suggests, Adams absolved his own behavior while betraying those who had volunteered to be soldiers for Ireland.

    As one former IRA volunteer said of the predicament of those who followed in their forefathers' footsteps and fought what they considered to be the good fight for a just and rightful cause:

Think of the armed struggle as the launch of a boat ... getting a hundred people to push the boat out. This boat is stuck in the sand, right, and get them to push the boat out and then the boat sailing off and leaving the hundred people behind, right. The boat is away, sailing on the high seas, with all the luxuries that it brings, and the poor people that launched the boat are left sitting in the muck and the dirt and the shit and the sand.

    But here, Keefe, ultimately if cautiously, defends Adams: "Whatever callous motivations Adams might have possessed, and whatever deceptive machinations he might have employed, he steered the IRA out of a bloody and intractable conflict and into a brittle but enduring peace."