Day 78: The Night Strangers

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Cover of The Night StrangersIt’s been awhile since I’ve reviewed a real creepfest, but The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian is certainly one. The book is a combination of a ghost story and a thriller, and I don’t want to tell you what else.

Chip and Emily Linton move with their twin daughters to a small New Hampshire town after Chip has been traumatized by a horrific accident. As an experienced airline pilot, he tried to make an emergency plane landing on a lake, only to end up killing 39 people. The family moves thinking that Chip will recover sooner if he is away from people who know what happened, but of course that is impossible.

The Lintons purchase a historic house that hasn’t been lived in for awhile. The house has some strange things about it, for one thing a door in the basement that has been sealed with 39 carriage bolts.

Chip becomes obsessed with the door, and then he begins seeing three of his dead passengers. To the reader, it is not clear whether the house is haunted or whether Chip is losing his mind.

Some local women, all herbalists, begin to befriend the family. Some of them show an unusual interest in the twin girls. Soon we become aware that the history of the house is unsavory–and involves twins.

The story is uneven. At some points it seems to be going one way, at others another. Our dread rises, but we don’t know exactly which of two possible horrendous endings will come about or whether the Lintons can escape altogether. But if you appreciate a good psychological thriller and all-around creepy book, you’ll probably enjoy The Night Strangers.

Day 77: Wolf Hall

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Cover for Wolf HallBest Book of Week 16!

This is a good time to write about Wolf Hall, because I was thrilled to learn that Hilary Mantel’s sequel to it has just come out. My copy is arriving soon. Mantel is always an interesting writer whose work does not occupy any one genre, although her last few books have been historical fiction. Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize and was one the best books I read in 2010.

The novel looks at the political and religious machinations of Henry VIII through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from low origins to become Henry’s chief minister. Although Cromwell has traditionally been viewed as Henry’s “heavy,” recent historians have looked at his career more kindly, showing that his work as chief minister brought England into more modern statehood and that his changes created more order for government functions that were less controlled by the whims of nobility.

Mantel depicts Cromwell as a loyal man who cares for his dependents and works to reform England. He builds up a great household as he moves from the position of secretary to Cardinal Wolsey to work for the king. Later, after the Cardinal’s downfall, he slowly, almost imperceptibly, works to bring down those who furthered their own interests by destroying the Cardinal, including the rapacious Boleyns.

Cromwell is loving to his family and friends, completely faithful to the Cardinal and then to Henry, intelligent, able in many spheres of work, and decent. Mantel paints a charming pictures of his home life. In contrast, she turns the tables on Thomas More, venerated for centuries, showing him as a sadistic torturer of Protestants who is in love with his own martyrdom.

Cromwell meets Jane Seymour when she is a young, lonely lady’s maid to the queen, teased and neglected by the rest of the court, and feels pity for her. Later, after he is long widowed, he falls in love with her. The title of the book is the name of her ancestral home, Wolf Hall.

Mantel’s approach is understated, leaving the reader sometimes to connect the ideas. The details in this novel seem completely authentic, and Mantel handles the period brilliantly. She somehow manages to generate tension and suspense even about things we know all about, like what will happen to Anne Boleyn.

Day 76: When Rain Clouds Gather

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Cover for When Rain Clouds GatherMakhaya, a refugee from South Africa, slips into Botswana at the beginning of When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head. It is the mid-60’s, and Botswana is peacefully gaining its independence from Britain. It is a poor country with much unarable soil and primitive farming techniques.

Makhaya has some problems settling into the village of Gomena, not the least of which is that the corrupt local Chief Matenge will not allow him in the village. He gets a job with a white man named Gilbert Balfour helping teach the villagers new agricultural methods.

The book is sparsely written and very short. Its themes are the conflict between tribalism and the newer ways, about the political changes and changes in customs occurring in the 60’s in Africa.

I found the book interesting, especially the depiction of traditional customs, but I felt it required more knowledge of the situation in Botswana and South Africa in the 60’s than I had. More is implied than expressed, which is a part of its beauty but can also be frustrating. For example, Makhaya has just left prison in South Africa, but I guess we are supposed to know what he might have been in prison for. We believe it is for political reasons, but no details are provided.

Bessie Head herself was a refugee from South Africa who settled in Botswana. I’m sure the novel reflects both some of the problems she had in making a new life and the relief she felt in being able to settle into a relatively tranquil place.

Day 75: Doc

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Cover for DocThanks go to my friend K.C. for recommending this book. Writing a very interesting tale of a tragic life, Mary Doria Russell does a good job of staying true to the facts while fictionalizing what she can’t know in Doc, the story of Dr. John Henry (Doc) Holliday.

Russell begins with Holliday as a young boy, delicate, raised as a Southern gentleman and educated by his mother. Although he is frail, he shows much promise for his intelligence, grace, and wit, but his chances are hurt first by the Civil War, which ruins his wealthy family, then by the tragedy of his mother’s death caused by sickness and starving, and finally by tuberculosis.

Already by the time he sets off in his early 20’s for Dallas to work in a dentistry practice, he is ill. Shortly after he arrives, a major collapse in the world economy causes him to lose his job and casts him adrift to live as best he can. Gambling and the hope of starting his own practice bring him to Dodge City, and the Earps bring him to Tombstone for the famous gunfight.

Russell does a great job of depicting Doc: a soft-spoken gentleman with a wicked tongue, generous to his friends, profligate with his money, a fine pianist, and patient with his rapacious prostitute mistress Kate, who also fell far from a proud background.

Russell also fills out the characters of the Earps, especially happy, kind Morgan and the rather thick-headed, upright Wyatt. Bat Masterson appears as self-aggrandizing, responsible for falsely depicting Doc in the media as a hardened killer.

Russell’s approach is a little disorienting. She periodically changes her narrative style to sound more like an old codger telling a yarn and at other times sounds like she is writing a nonfiction biography. It is hard to tell whether she makes these style shifts purposely or has trouble removing herself from her source material. Although most of the book is chronological, she occasionally plays with time by going back to tell about a character’s earlier life.

Overall, Doc is a sympathetic, involving effort.

Day 74: A Caribbean Mystery

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Cover for A Caribbean MysteryAgatha Christie is one of the best mystery writers of the so-called Golden Age of mystery writing because she so skillfully sketches believable characters and plots. Although many of the Golden Age mysteries concentrate on perplexing puzzles such as figuring out railway timetables, Christie was much more interested in the personality of the murderer and his or her motivations.

A Caribbean Mystery begins after Miss Marple has suffered a serious bout of pneumonia. Her affectionate nephew Raymond has arranged a vacation for her on an island in the Caribbean, where she can recover. But of course her vacation isn’t as restful as her nephew had hoped.

She is only half listening to boring Major Palgrave when he offers to show her the snapshot of  a murderer, but just then he sees something and quickly begins chatting about something else. That night he is found dead, apparently of a heart attack.

Miss Marple is having grave doubts about that heart attack when the chambermaid reports that before his death the Major Palgrave did not have the heart medication found in his room. Shortly thereafter, she is found stabbed to death.

Miss Marple begins sizing up her suspects. Molly Kendal, owner of the hotel with her husband Tim, has been behaving oddly, having nightmares and reporting blackouts and feelings of paranoia. Years ago, Greg Dyson’s wife died and he married her cousin Lucky within a month. Colonel Hillingdon and his wife Evelyn appear close, but are they really? And are they as friendly with the Dysons as they seem to be? The elderly and wealthy Mr. Rafiel is too feeble to be a murderer, but his secretary Esther Walters is secretive and Miss Marple spots his attendant Jackson skulking around.

As usual, Christie does a deft job of quickly limning believable characters and a complex mixture of motives and red herrings in a brief novel that is fun to read. I spotted the killer quickly but still enjoyed the book.

Day 73: A Thousand Splendid Suns

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Cover for a Thousand Splendid SunsBest Book of Week 15!

A Thousand Splendid Suns is Khaled Hosseini’s second novel, about the love between two women set in the backdrop of the wars in Afghanistan. The novel begins in a time of peace with the story of the older woman, Mariam, who as a young illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man hero-worships her father and does not believe her mother’s warnings about him. When she is fifteen, she finds out the kind of man he is through a series of horrible events, beginning when she goes to the house of his legitimate family to ask him to take her to the movies. Her mother dies, and within days, her father’s legitimate family marries her off far away in Kabul to a much older man, Rasheed. Rasheed is kind to her at first, but when she cannot bring a child to term, he becomes abusive.

A neighbor of Rasheed and Mariam, Laila is 20 years younger than Mariam. She has been brought up and educated by her loving parents to be brave. She has always been in love with her childhood friend Tajik and they expect to marry, but Tajik’s family leaves the country during the war because of his father’s illness. Just as Laila’s parents are preparing to leave as well, they are killed. Rasheed, now in his 60’s, takes in Laila purportedly as an act of kindness and tricks her into marrying him.

Initially distrustful of each other, the two women soon each becomes the only person the other can trust as they lose all their rights under the government of the Taliban. Trapped in an abusive marriage, they must work together to survive.

Hosseini’s story-telling is absolutely compelling. The women’s existence is harsh, and he tells their story with compassion. The ending will leave you in tears.

Day 72: The Indian Bride

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Cover for The Indian BrideI previously read one book by Karin Fossum and felt neutral about it, but then I read The Indian Bride. I was extremely touched and involved by this Norwegian small-town mystery.

A naive and uncomplicated bachelor farmer, Gunder Jomann, sees a picture of an Indian woman in a book and decides to go to India to find a wife. This journey is a daunting prospect for a man who has hardly ever left his small town of Elvestad, but he is determined. The story of his journey is brief but touching. He is successful and returns home to prepare for the arrival of his new wife, Poona, while she settles her affairs in India.

Just as he is leaving for the airport to pick Poona up, Gunder gets a call from the hospital. His beloved sister has been in a terrible accident. From the hospital, he calls the local taxi driver and asks him to pick up Poona, but the driver misses her at the airport. The next day Poona’s body is found in a field near Gunder’s house.

Inspector Konrad Sejer and his partner Jacob Skarre are assigned to solve the crime. Most crime novels since Sherlock Holmes deal with solving puzzles posed by clever criminals, but this novel is unusual in reflecting the type of crime that is probably more often dealt with by the police, random violence by people who are not professional criminals and not particularly clever. Some of the suspects are a local café owner, a muscle-bound young man, and an attention-seeking teenager. In a strange way, the focus of the novel reflects a more innocent world, which is exactly how I felt when reading about Gunder and Poona’s romance. I kept hoping the body would turn out to be that of some other Indian woman, not Poona.

The setting is rich, the characters are complex, the puzzle is interesting. I find Inspector Sejer not as well developed as some of his suspects, but perhaps I just need to read more Fossum.

Day 71: Thinking, Fast and Slow

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Cover for Thinking, Fast and SlowEarly in his career, Daniel Kahneman got interesting in why people, even experts, do not seem to use statistics and follow economic models in making decisions and judgments. His research with his main collaborator Amos Tversky eventually ended in his winning the 2002 Nobel prize in economic science, which is unusual because he is a psychologist. Thinking, Fast and Slow explains the results of years of studies on understanding how the human brain makes decisions and judgments. His major theme in this extremely interesting, well-written book is human irrationality. His work with Tversky, he says, “challenges the idea that people are generally rational.”

For better understanding of the ideas explained in the book, Kahneman begins with the analogy that there are two systems employed in decision making: the fast-thinking, intuitive, unconscious system that keeps us safe and handles our day-to-day actions but is prone to error, and the deliberative system that reasons through more informed decisions but is lazy and has to be actively engaged.

Kahneman shows the evidence from experiments that many more of our decisions are controlled by our unconscious than by conscious decision-making, and therefore, we do not always make decisions the way that economic models have assumed. He makes his points using fairly simple experiments that you can try yourself, so that you recognize the faulty assumptions and cognitive biases underlying your own reasoning. In examining these experiments, he shows their profound implications. The result is an entertaining book full of intellectual surprises that was chosen as one of the New York Times Best Books for 2011.

Although Kahneman provides some ways of recognizing patterns that can result in bad decisions, he cautions that it may be impossible to teach yourself to always avoid these pitfalls and says that he is unable to do it consistently himself. He reminds us that all of us tend to have an exaggerated sense of our understanding of the world and shows that much more of what happens is random than we acknowledge or understand.

Day 70: The Golden Compass

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Cover for The Golden CompassThe Golden Compass is the first book in Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials, a children’s book that appeals as much to adults because it is just plain exciting.

Lyra is an adventurous eleven-year-old orphan brought up by the scholars of Oxford in a world that is similar to ours in a previous century. In this world, every person has a daemon, an animal creature who is always with the person and who shares the person’s feelings. Until a child reaches puberty, the daemon changes from one animal to another.

Lyra is a bit of a wild child who spends most of her time clambering on the college roofs with her friend Roger, the kitchen boy, and getting into fights with the town kids. She has heard rumors of the Gobblers, a group who steals children, but she hasn’t paid much attention to them. Her real adventures begin the day she sneaks into the scholar’s room, where she is not supposed to be. She is hiding when she overhears a mysterious conversation about something called “dust” and sees the Master poison her Uncle Asriel’s wine. She is able to warn her uncle in time.

After her uncle departs on an expedition to the north, her friend Roger is stolen by the Gobblers. Then Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon are removed from Oxford by the beautiful and mysterious Mrs. Coulter and taken to London. Before she leaves, the Master gives her the golden compass, a device that can tell the future, and says she should hide it from Mrs. Coulter.

Lyra flees from Mrs. Coulter’s house when she learns that Mrs. Coulter’s monkey daemon has been spying for the compass and also figures out that Mrs. Coulter is one of the Gobblers. She throws her lot in with a gang of the gyptians, a tribe of wanderers who have joined forces to go north and fetch back the stolen children.

The Golden Compass is wonderfully inventive. Just as a side note, I also greatly admired the movie, with its cool steampunk look. Lyra is a great heroine, you just love Pantalaimon, and you get very attached to many of the other characters. Full of action and suspense, The Golden Compass is a great book.

Day 69: The Information Officer

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Cover for The Information OfficerI really enjoyed Mark Mills’s book Amagansett from a few years ago and liked The Savage Garden. However, I did not find his third book, The Information Officer, as satisfying.

It is World War II during the siege of Malta. The British are trying to get their Spitfires to Malta to defend it, but in the meantime the strategic island is being heavily bombed. Major Max Chadwick’s job as information officer is to deliver updates to the local newspaper that are as positive as possible and figure out what is truth and what fiction.

Max’s good friend Freddy comes to him with information that someone is murdering Maltese dance hall girls, and there is evidence that the murderer is a British submariner. Freddy, a doctor, has already raised the problem with the high command and gotten nowhere, so Max decides to investigate. In the meantime, the murderer is plotting his moves.

The novel was interesting enough, with good descriptions of Malta and a fairly involving plot. However, I did not grow to care very much about the characters. I figured out the murderer, although not his motive, fairly easily.