4 posts tagged “canada”
The eccentric Commissaire Adamsberg and his team, with varying degrees of reluctance, are going to Canada to learn about DNA fingerprinting techniques from none other than the famed Mounties. Before leaving, however, Adamsberg learns of a death that strikes him with dread, for the victim has been killed by what appears to be a home-made trident, a method identical to that used by Adamsberg's bete noir, a serial killer called Judge Fulgence, who has been dead for more than ten years. How can a ghost have committed a murder? If you can't live with a trident as a murder weapon, you probably shouldn't read on, as there is much to follow that is even more bizarre.
Adamsberg had grown up in the same village as the judge. When he was a teenager, a young girl was killed, her death blamed on her boyfriend, Adamsberg's younger brother Raphael. Accused of the crime, Raphael managed to disappear before being convicted (partly helped by his brother), but Adamsberg became convinced that the judge was to blame and has (we are now told) spent a large part of his subsequent career trying and failing to convict the evil judge. The judge's network of contacts not only kept him safe from the law but, Adamsberg is convinced, framed other people for the crimes and, through blackmail, kept those people silent about the truth.
The new murder brings all this history to light. Adamsberg manages to alienate the local police investigating the crime by his insistence that the evil but dead judge is to blame. At this point, he and his team leave for Montreal and Adamsberg has to put his doubts on hold. The Montreal sequence of the novel is full of nice observational touches of culture clashes and character sketches, with an academic twist. Here is Adamsberg trying to distract his colleague Danglard from his terror of flying by persuading him to watch the plane's TV channel:
"There's a documentary about the precursors of the Italian Renaissance. That's for you, isn't it? The Italian Renaissance?"
"Already know all that stuff”, muttered Danglard, his expression fixed, his fingers still gripping the armrests.
"Even the precursors?"
"Know all that too."
In Canada, on one of his regular walks by the river, Adamsberg meets the Frenchwoman Noella, a rather unhinged person who has taken to hanging about there while she works to pay for her flight home after being abandoned by her lover. She drags a reluctant Adamsberg into an affair: even though Adamsberg doesn't seem to like or be attracted to Noella, he acts out of jealousy after jumping to conclusions when glimpsing Camille, a previous lover - who in one of rather too many coincidences that pepper this book, happens to be in the country playing in a string quintet.
When the course is over, the team returns to Paris, where Adamsberg becomes increasingly alienated because of his conviction that the judge is still alive and is continuing his killing spree. Then he is told to return to Canada with an unlikeable colleague, Lieutenant Retancourt, to help the Mounties with an investigation. When Adamsberg arrives, he finds himself accused of murder - of someone who has been killed in just the same way as one of the judge's victims. This is the part of the book in which Adamsberg is least sympathetic as a character, as all his efforts and thoughts are focused on himself and of his escape, and none at all for the victim, who he treats very callously. The character of Retancourt provides some welcome thrills and offbeat humour, but for me this whole episode is tainted by this coldness in which the victim is ignored and unmourned, it seems by everyone. In another unlikely coincidence, Adamsberg discovers that his long-lost brother Raphael is living in North America.
Adamsberg spends most of the rest of the book as a fugitive hiding out at the flat of old, loyal Clementine (a character from the previous book), with plenty of time to think. It isn't too hard for the reader to work out the basic outline of how and why Adamsberg has been put in this predicament: the pleasures of this book are not the rather weak mystery elements, rather they are the many charmingly eccentric aspects of a story which eventually unfold into Adamsberg's full realisation of how the crimes had been committed, and a final vindication.
There are far too many convenient coincidences: the reappearance of Raphael, Retancourt's ubiquitously helpful friend who can fake passports, the brilliant hacking talents of Clementine's ancient lodger who mysteriously manages to find out the answer to any question asked of her by a few hours on the internet, and other assorted conveniences. Look too close and the whole construct - a judge who can "die" and who over many years forces various doctors, lawyers and others to abet his crimes - is frankly risible. However, Vargas is such a charming writer that one can suspend belief and be carried along by her alternative universe, her telling observations of character and culture, and admire the house of mirrors she creates in this amusing and absorbing, yet cold, tale.
The first chapter of ICE TRAP is a compelling account of a young boy's solo hunting trip in the snowy sub-Arctic wastes. By the chapter's end, he has been attacked by a polar bear and we don't know whether he survives.
The action then shifts to modern Wales, where surgeon Dafydd and his wife Isobel, an interior designer, are trying to conceive a child. Their comfortable lives are turned upside down by a letter out of the blue from the remote north-west Canadian community of Moose Creek. The letter is from a teenage girl, Miranda, purporting to be Dafydd's daughter. Dafydd recalls a time when as a young doctor he made a mistake while performing an operation, and in a kind of penance, spent a year or so working in this snowy outpost. He can't understand, however, why the girl thinks he is her father, as he not only did not have a relationship with her mother, the chief nurse of the local hospital, but he could not stand her.
Despite his doubts, the results of the subsequent DNA tests reveal that Miranda and her twin brother Mark are indeed his children. Dafydd decides he must return to the area to meet his children and decide how to continue his life, particularly in light of the distinctly unsympathetic reaction from Isobel. The rest of the book tells the story in flashback of Dafydd's previous experiences at Moose Creek, and what he finds there when he returns after so many years.
Although ICE TRAP is a page-turner, I found the book unsatisfying in several aspects. Dafydd, in particular, is not a sympathetic main character, being passive, weak and incurious. Indeed, it is not until very late on that I encountered anyone I liked, and this person has only a fleeting if significant role. Dafydd's earlier time at Moose Creek does not really ring true to me: Sheila, the head nurse (and Dafydd's putative co-parent) has too much control over both the running of the hospital and the doctors who work there to be realistic. Although many of the dynamics that baffled Dafydd during his first stay in the region are solved when he returns as an older, and wiser, man, the basic mystery (parenthood of the twins) is too obvious, including the twist, and the various characters he re-encounters on his return haven't engaged my sympathy enough on the first outing, for me to care very much about what has happened to them in the interim, or about their personal tragedies, when these are revealed.
I liked the final chapters, where the plot does provide some tension and the writing conveys genuine emotion. Dafydd's attempts to relate to his children and his ability, finally, to make some decisions make him more likeable. But the rest of the book, although containing some nice touches, is not as good as some of the earlier reviews in the UK national press had led me to believe it would be.
An Iron Rose, In the Evil Day, Bad Debts
These three books by Peter Temple, read in a post-Broken Shore wave of enthusiasm, are gripping, unputdownable and highly recommended. An Iron Rose is set in the cold, wet countryside near Melbourne. “Mac” Faraday is an ex-policeman with a broken marriage, still mourning his father after some years. He’s a part-time blacksmith and part-time landscape garden-labourer, when he isn’t playing for the local football team. The book opens with the apparent suicide of Mac’s neighbour and friend Ned Lowey, and continues with Mac’s and the police’s parallel, but not mutually friendly, investigation of the death. Many of the elements of The Broken Shore are reprised here in slightly different guise: the strong, silent hero irresistible to women (and he to them), the poetry of the land and working with one’s hands and institutionalised corruption. Like The Broken Shore, the solution to the mystery in An Iron Rose lies in a children’s home, this time for “wayward” girls. These similarities should not put you off from reading both books, but don’t do as I did and read them too close together.
In the Evil Day is a surveillance thriller of breathtaking pace and fiendishly convoluted twists and turns. Set mainly in Germany and the UK with a prologue in South Africa, the main protagonists are John Anslem, a freed hostage who can’t return to full mental or physical health since his ordeal; Caroline Wishart, a journalist trying to break the story of the decade but instead being manipulated by just about everyone; and Con Niemand, a South African ex-mercenary who has the information that everyone seems to want to kill him for. You really won’t be able to put this book down once you start it, it is like John LeCarré on speed: if you can keep up with the plot then I admire you – but more than that, the characters are sympathetic and their plights moving. Definitely not a book to miss.
Temple returns to the same structure as The Broken Shore and An Iron Rose in Bad Debts, the first of his Jack Irish novels. Jack is a hero in the same mould as Mac Faraday and The Broken Shore’s Joe Cashin; in fact some might reasonably say they are indistinguishable once you’ve substituted a smithy for a furniture-making workshop and horse racing for soccer. All the men have loyal friends who are specialised at just the skill that is needed at a given time. Jack Irish, a widower and “retired” lawyer, is a less sympathetic protagonist than the other two, though – he’s not that principled and is genuinely cowardly. However, I warmed to him in the last part of the book when his girlfriend, a feisty reporter, makes him do the decent thing. The plot of Bad Debts concerns the death of after his release from prison of a petty criminal who had been poorly defended by Jack. In a fit of conscience, Jack begins to investigate the man’s death and uncovers a nest of corrupt vipers. All great stuff, and the horse-racing syndicate adds an extra dimension.
The Chicago Way by Michael Harvey is a different kettle of fish – a noir thriller in the mode of Chandler or Ellroy. Michael Edwards, private eye and ex-cop, is asked first by an old colleague and then by a suspiciously beautiful young woman to find out what really happened when she was viciously attacked some years ago. Edwards works by using his contacts to delve into the Chicago police force’s various archives – it seemed to me to be slightly stretching it to think that the answers to unsolved murder cases were simply sitting on a dusty shelf because everyone was too busy to follow them up, but the modus operandi gives the author chance to air his expertise in these matters. As time goes on, it seems more and more likely as if a serial killer is at work. Although I felt that the book was not entirely credible, especially when things come to a head regarding Edrward’s childhood friend from the streets and the unconvincing, somewhat clichéd, denouement involving his client, the book is a lean, mean read – with his knowledge of the windy city, Harvey has the potential to move up to Connelly or Crais territory if he reduces the slight “made for TV” taste in favour of tighter plotting..
Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell is a poetic novella set in the Ozarks – the impoverished and (in this book) icily cold mountain region of Missouri and Arkansas. Ree Dolly is a 16-year-old member of one of the clannish and impoverished families of the area, and the book describes her Homeric search for her missing father, who has put up the family house as security against a court appearance. The privations experienced by Ree as she pursues her apparently hopeless quest, against a background of trying to keep her small family together, are horrific. The hideous ramifications of “crank” (methamphetamine) production, the modern moonshine, are so intensely conveyed that I sometimes could barely read on. Yet the book is not gratuitous – rather I kept wondering why Ree let herself suffer so. We know she dreams of joining the US Army, but why does she stay in this closed community – closed to the assistance of education, medicine and the law? I was answered by the end of the book, when Ree’s Greek tragedy is played out: like Frodo, she has played by the only rules that can matter for her, and she receives her reward. A desperately sad book, brilliantly conveying the histories and culture of these people, and one that won’t leave you in a hurry.
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn is a very different novel of the deep south. Here is melodrama in full: Joan Crawford-like mothers, Lolita-like daughters, soap-opera and teen high-school mixed in Grand Guignol of the first order. The plot is driven by a young and, we are told, second-rate reporter, Camille Preaker, who is sent by the grandfatherly editor of her Chicago newspaper to her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri, when a young girl is abducted and killed. The idea is that Camille will break the story and regain honour both for herself and for her lesser-known paper. Because she has no budget, Camille has to stay with her estranged family: her obsessively houseproud and remote mother, her uninvolved stepfather and her precocious teenage half-sister. Everyone in her family, and everyone Camille meets, whether police, old school friends, or various members of the community, are universally strange or downright weird. This is one of those books where you could almost strangle the heroine yourself because she acts like a child and refuses to take control of the situation she’s in, being a passive victim of her circumstances. (Her body is covered in words made by cutting herself over a period of many years.) But she perseveres (or maybe I should write stumbles) to a solution of sorts. Without a doubt, the parodic account of the apparently perfect small town seething with vice under the surface is a page-turner, and the book probably deserves its enthusiastic cover blurb from Stephen King. This one is best-seller, not literary, crime.
The Murmur of Stones by Thomas H Cook is a claustrophobic little account of the death by drowning of a severely autistic boy. The tale is told by David, the boy’s uncle, and through him we gradually learn of his ghastly childhood, being bought up by a megalomaniac failed author whose wife has left him. Scarred by these experiences and his shattered family, David has a deliberately dull life with his wife Patty and daughter Abby. His sister Diana, however, is brilliant, and is completely distraught when her autistic son dies on one of the rare occasions she’s gone out and left her husband in charge. Cook builds up the tension beautifully in the book—did the boy’s father murder him? Did Diana? Diana’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and obsessive, zeroing in on Abby for her theories about memory in inanimate objects. Although the eventual solution is a bit of a cheat, this creepy tale reverberates in the mind. Diana is a particularly vivid creation.
Giles Blunt’s The Fields of Grief continues his excellent Algonquin Bay series, featuring detectives Cardinal and Delorme. I don’t recommend reading this one if you haven’t read the previous books, as this one starts with a real shock to regular readers whose impact will be lost if you aren’t aware of the history of the characters. I am not going to reveal the shock here, but plenty of other reviewers have done, and the book’s blurb reveals it, too. The investigation is very sad, and gradually reveals one of the creepiest and nastiest villains I’ve encountered (fictionally) for some time. I particularly liked Delorme’s thoughts on decorum – I would not agree with her in such a wholesale way about Americans, but I share her view that a return to more decorous ways would both be pleasant and go some way to avoiding some of society’s ills.
Finally, Still Life by Louise Penny is a bit of a romantic fantasy. A murder occurs in a beautiful little village in Canada (near Quebec), one of those villages where everyone is an artist or a perfect cook. There are nice touches, for example the female police graduate recruit who messes everything up in such an unaware fashion, and who isn’t a heroine. But although the book is a pleasant read with some nice echoes of Miss Marple, I could not get too involved in its “cosy” ambience. A lot of people have liked it, though, as it won the “best first novel” Arthur Ellis award from the Crime Writers of Canada (I presume in 2005 when the book was first published).
The winner of this year's Costa (formerly Whitbread) prize for first novel, and winner of the overall prize, is a suspenseful, atmospheric novel set in Canada. It is 1867, and the small settlement of Caulfield is witness to a murder. Laurent Jammet, a trapper, trader and loner, is found dead in his bed by his neighbour and the book's main character, Mrs Ross.
Over the next few days, we learn about several of the people who live in the settlement, and those who travel to and from it. We also learn that this is not the first untimely death or accident that the inhabitants have experienced: some years ago, two young girls went out picking berries and never returned. Their mother eventually died of grief, and after years of searching for them, their father died also. The local physician, Doc Wade, was found drowned in Dove River a couple of years previously. Now Francis, Mrs Ross's son, has also vanished, yet his father seems distant and unconcerned.
This cloud of suspicion covers the small town like a blanket. Inside it, we see the lives and characters of the Ross and the Knox families, other neighbours, and the Company men who come to investigate Jammet's death - McKinley, Moody and associates - and their interactions with the locals. (The Company is revealed as the Hudson Bay Company). A trapper friend of Jammet's called Parker, half Indian and half white, is arrested for the crime, but he does not seem a likely suspect. Mrs Ross is desperate to find her son, another friend of the dead man, before he too is suspected.
By this point, although I was enjoying the book, I thought that there were too many characters in it to be able to fix any firmly in my mind or to care very much about any of them. Once the journey started, however, the book began to exert a strong spell on me. The developing relationship between Parker and Mrs Ross, together with her sad tale, is very moving. Parker tells her of an abandoned wolf cub he once found and bought up as a dog, until "It remembered it was a wolf, not a pet. It stared into the distance. Then one day it was gone. The Chippewa have a word for it - it means "the sickness of long thinking". You cannot tame a wild animal, because it will always remember where it is from, and yearn to go back."
This phrase, "the sickness of long thinking", is the key to this wonderful book. The story turns into a book of journeys by most of the characters, and by these journeys we come to know their true natures. Several, but not all, of the mysteries, old and new, are eventually solved, and several of the characters come to know themselves and their families more deeply.
Perhaps there are slightly too many elements in the book than are strictly necessary: the Norwegian settlement and the story of Line is the least successful aspect, to my mind. And, given the number of criss-crossing journeys, the book would certainly have benefited from a map. But these are very minor quibbles. The book is brilliant - I have not done it full justice by this brief review.
