Iza Moreau's Blog: Blogging in Small Towns, page 3

Roll over Chas Dickens and tell Tom Hardy the news

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


What, mention Sarah Waters in the same sentence with Charles Dickens--my favorite novelist of all time? Yes indeed. But not only for her subject matter, which delves deep into the demimonde of Victorian society, but for the quality of her writing and for the twists and turns that writing takes.

That Waters is influenced by Dickens there can be no doubt. Fingersmith begins qulte literally in a den of thieves similar to the one in which Oliver Twist finds himself. It even has its own versions of Fagin and Bill Sikes. The Artful Dodger, though, is the protagonist, Susan Trindle--a young pickpocket and scam-artist-in-training.

But that's where the influence ends and Waters' creativity kicks into gear. For one thing, Dickens' characters, no matter how low-born or unseedy, never stoop to profanity--no matter how prevalent it might have been in real life. Waters has no such scruples. The enjoyment of erotic literature--one of the many themes in Fingersmith--is never acknowledged by Dickens. And as far as I can remember, Dickens never raises the specter of same-sex couples. Waters does. In fact, it is one of her specialties and one of the things that lift her books to a new level in modern literature.

While Dickens'novels move steadily and satisfyingly to a conclusion, Fingersmith has a couple of plot twists that will almost literally spin you from your chair. But each surprise to the reader is a life-altering change for the characters as they hover between deception, sensuality, madness, and murder.

And finally, did Dickens ever write a really convincing love story? Well, maybe the story of Arthur Clennem and Amy Dorrit comes close but it pales beside the emotional turmoil in which Sue Trindle finds herself. Like the love story in Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, this one ranges from innocence to euphoria to despair to all of these at once.

It is impossible to recommend this novel too highly. Like Waters' later novel, The Night Watch, it adds significantly to not only modern literature, but to literature itself.






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Shallow as a badly dug grave

I know that in music, a lot of people will wait until an artist's second or third album before they will buy. By that time the artist will have learned more and become more mature. I agree most of the time. The same may be true of literature. Oliver Twist is better than The Pickwick Papers, for instance. And Roderick Hudson is better than Watch and Ward.

But in novels that are part of a series, I'll always want to read the first one first. Why? Because the first novel is the one in which the author sets up the characters, the characters' surroundings, mannerisms, friends, and habits. Stieg Larsson's Millennium series is a case in point. Both Lizbeth Salander and Michael Bloomquist are given the complete treatment in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo so that he can relax a little in books 2 and 3 and concentrate more on plot. We feel that we know these characters and are anxious to see what they will get up to next.

I made a mistake in reading Eve Zaremba's fifth Helen Keremos novel before I read the first. Everything was already set and I felt like I was missing out on a lot of background that would have helped me know Helen better and respect her more.

But in this case, not much was lost. In the first Keremos novel, Reason to Kill, we find out next to nothing about the female detective other than that she is a female detective that lives in Canada and has a fearless, no-nonsense approach to people and situations. For all the (belated) hype about Helen being the first lesbian detective, there is actually no reference to her sexuality in this first novel at all. At one point one of her suspects calls her a "dyke," but I have heard more than one man use that term on women who simply refuse to go out with them.

The novel is short, not much more than a novella; not much room to give a complete background on Helen or on anything else. The mystery itself is not a bad one, although the actual solution is kind of ridiculous. But so are the solutions in most of the popular TV shows, like Bones, for instance--I can't speak to the actual Kathy Reichs novels because I've never read one.

Yet I am giving this a 3 instead of a 2 because Zaremba herself states that she is trying to stay within the hard-boiled detective tradition, and this she does. She writes about gay issues here, too--an important topic not only when she wrote it but now as well.

Maybe I'm griping because I expect mysteries to be as well-clothed and as stiffly underpinned as more literary novels, having likable characters with depth and feeling. This is actually what I am trying to do in my own "Small Town" series. You might like your mysteries like those of J.D. Robb--crank 'em out and get 'em sold--the more the better. If so, go for it. You might like this one, too.

A near-perfect ride

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


When you are riding a dressage test, every step is important. You train hard to achieve perfection in each gait, each movement. But even at the highest levels of the sport, there will probably be glitches--a little bobble in the walk-canter transition, a misstep in the canter pirouette, a flying change that is late behind.

That's how I felt about this book. It was an incredible ride almost up until the end, then a glitch, a bobble, and a halt-salute that wasn't quite square.

Regardless, this story of love between two women is a true classic of the genre. One that few people even know about, perhaps because Highsmith is remembered mostly for her suspense novels featuring the killer Tom Ripley. But The Price of Salt was written at the beginning of her career and under an assumed name because of it's lesbian content.

Highsmith's description of the early 1950s is brilliant, as is her depiction of the bright but innocent young set designer Therees Belvet. Her relationship with the married Carol Aird is both touching and believable. The suspense near the end of the book illustrates the fear that everyone that was in such a relationship must have felt at that time. Disgust, horror, aversion, ostracism. But Highsmith makes it come out all right in the end, although somehow she seems to rush too quickly toward that end, like a dressage rider losing the rhythm.

Still, a wonderful trip and one that I may take again and again. Not a 5, but at least a 4,5. Good enough for high-point award in almost any competition.





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Fatally Flawed

The Butterfly Effect by Eve Zaremba

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I think I started on the wrong book. This is the fifth one in the Helen Keremos mystery series and the author doesn't really have much left to pad the book with. In other words, we don't really find out much about Helen, other than she is a middle-aged lesbian P.I. with supreme confidence in her abilities and almost no fear. There's nothing wrong with this combination, but it's not much in itself. We rarely get a glimpse into Helen's psyche, her feelings, or her past. I suspect the first book or two in the series might have exhausted this.

In this one, Keremos is on her way to Hong Kong on business when she gets caught up in the murder of a Japanese Yakuza member who may have been involved in art forgeries so perfect that they are nearly impossible to detect. Pretty heady stuff for a start. But all the subsequent twists and turns are so difficult to follow that you might end up flipping to the end just to get it over with. I stayed with it to the enc, which may not have been a good idea.

The main premise--that someone has developed a method of making perfect forgeries of stolen paintings--right down to the molecular level of the paint--is a new and unique concept to the genre, almost taking it into the realm of science fiction. Trouble is, we never learn who was doing these forgeries. In fact, from what we know about all the characters, none had the requisite knowledge to even attempt this, much less succeed at it. This is what I call a Fatal Flaw in a mystery--something that, no matter how good the rest of is is (and this one is none too good)--makes the novel as a whole a failure.

I looked forward to reading about Helen Keremos, who is sometimes referred to as the first lesbian detective. As a writer of lesbian mysteries myself, I hope I learned something from Zaremba. I also plan on going back and reading at least the first one in the series to see how the character of Helen was developed. As for The Butterfly Effect (not a good title), I'll give it a 2.2. Not really bad, but certainly not recommended.



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Sarah Waters' WW II Blitz

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a book that is hard to blurb and hard to review; it is simply too rich and varied to summarize. Yet it is also too important not to make an attempt.

Set in the 1940s, this incredible novel follows the lives, loves, and fortunes of four Londoners during and just after the London blitz of WWII. Kay, an ambulance driver, meets Helen and Viv by chance during the bombings, and their lives become inextricably entwined. At the same time, Viv’s brother Duncan is doing time in Wormwood Scrubs for a crime that it never quite pinpointed.

Waters writes the book backwards; that is, she begins at a relatively calm moment just after the war, at a time that the characters have become settled in their surroundings. The rest of the book takes us back several years to show us exactly how all this came about. This is a curious technique and at first I was confounded by it. After much reflection, though, I realized that if the story were written from beginning to end, it would not have been quite as powerful.

Although reminiscent somewhat in tone to Muriel Spark's Girls of Slender Means, Waters' novel is more expansive, more concerned with the intricacies of love and war, acceptance and abandonment. Her descriptions of the London bombings are the best in literature--absolutely riveting--and the relationships between her characters are always interesting and compelling.

The Night Watch lost out to Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. A pity. I suspect, though, that this book puts Waters in a favorable position for a bigger and more important prize: the Nobel. Writing of this caliber is rare and her reward will come.











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The Second Inspector Chen

Snake Agent by Liz Williams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I was led to this book while searching for the Inspector Chen mysteries written by Qiu Xiaolong, set in modern China. But I was intrigued by the blurb, explaining that this Chen worked on cases involving demons and ghosts. So I bought it and was well rewarded. Not only is the world a unique one, but the writing is much better than I expected.

What captivated me most, though, was the way that Williams drove me through the novel by adding new characters, each one more interesting and odd than the previous ones, and how the story kept unfolding layer after mysterious layer.

I feel that if I had read this book earlier, my own novels would be slightly different; not better necessarily, but different. In fact, since I am midway through my third "Small Town" novel, I can honestly say that I hope that it has some of Snake Agent within it.

It is not as good as the Xiaolong mysteries, but few mysteries are. Give this a solid 4.



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CSI: 2059

Conspiracy in Death by J.D. Robb

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I picked this up in the library because of the character and the setting: Eve Dallas, a tough cop in post-apocalyptic New York City, 2059. Eve had been an abused child who ended up killing her rapist father before losing her memory and being given a new identity. Pretty heady stuff for a beginning. What it turned out to be, though, was more like a futuristic CSI--a show that is watched by millions of people, but which I dislike. In the hands of a better writer, such as Jennifer Pelland, this novel could have rocked. Robb, however, is what she is.

Here are a couple of reasons why the book was disappointing. First, J.D. Robb (or Nora Roberts) simply writes too much. Probably 20 percent of the book could have been edited out. It is as if every idea the author has must be written out completely. Second, Eve's husband Roark is simply too perfect. He is not only the best-looking man in the known universe, he is also the richest, as well as being the best computer hacker, lock picker, and lover. Third, Robb's sex scenes are more appropriate for Roberts' fat romance novels. There is entirely too much arching, burning, and going over edges. This tendency to juxtapose stylistic sex with realistic murder and mayhem just doesn't work. Nor does her tendency to switch points of view between paragraphs work literarily. Toni Morrison, in Song of Solomon shows us that this technique is possible; in Robb, it seems like an unedited mistake.

Here are a couple of facts about Nora Roberts. She writes 8 hours a day, no matter where she is. She has written over 200 novels, which may or may not include the 45 "In Death" novels under her Robb pseudonym. Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, wrote one.

Too much writing, too little editing. Still,give this one a 2.3 or so and go on to something better.



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Giveaway, Giveaway, Giveaway, Give . . .

The first novel in my Small Town Series, The News in Small Towns featuring Pine Oak Courier reporter Sue-Ann McKeown, is now available as a paperback giveaway on Goodreads. The giveaway starts today and ends on October 7. The novel is also available as an e-book.

Not sure you want to bother? Read the Goodreads reviews about Sue-Ann and her friends as they solve odd but complicated equine mysteries. "A Question of Breeding" is about a new horse owner who thinks she may have been swindled. "Sensei" tells you a few things you might need to know about Tennessee Walking Horse training.

The second novel in the series--Madness in Small Towns--will be published as both an e-book and a paperback for the New Year, 2013. And continue to look for more stand-alone stories about Sue-Ann.