Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by Tordotcom on June 4, 2024

Service Model is an amusing story of a robot’s search for purpose. There has been an apocalypse (or a series of apocalyptic events) but it wasn’t caused by a robot revolution. In fact, quite the opposite. Since the cause of civilization’s collapse is the point of the novel, I won’t reveal it, but I will say that Adrian Tchaikovsky furthers the grand tradition of exploring big ideas through science fiction.  

Some humans have survived the end of civilization, but they are outnumbered by robots who follow their programming, carrying on with tasks that have become meaningless. They are increasingly starting to glitch, the end of civilization having had “a negative impact on scheduled updates.” They wander in circles, freeze in place when their memories are full, haul freight back and forth that never gets unloaded. Robots are lining up at repair centers for maintenance that will never be scheduled. Being dutiful robots, they stand in line until they stop functioning altogether.

The story’s protagonist is Charles, a valet robot who works in a manor for a wealthy recluse. Since his master no longer entertains or goes out, Charles maintains a social calendar that is empty and lays out clothing that is never worn. This does not bother Charles, who is content in his performance of useless tasks. Serving a human is all he wants to do, even if the service has no value.

One day, while Charles is shaving his master, he discovers that his master’s throat has been cut. Charles endeavors to go about his day — even reasoning that taking his dead master for a drive might cheer him up — before the majordomo that operates the house calls a robot doctor and a robot cop. Hilarity ensues.

Charles realizes he might have a fault that will require diagnostic intervention but hopes he won’t be sent into retirement. “Given the considerable investment in domestic service that Charles represented, surely he should be allowed to murder three, or even five people before being deemed irreparably unfit for service.”

The plot follows Charles as he searches for another human to serve. He makes his way to Diagnostics, where he hopes a software adjustment will make further murders improbable. He meets a girl who, by virtue of her attire, he mistakes for a robot. She introduces herself as The Wonk and tries to convince him that he has acquired the Protagonist Virus and is now self-aware and autonomous. Charles is certain he is neither of those.

Diagnostics is overcrowded with robots who will never be fixed, so Charles is sent to Data Compression, where it seems his fate is to be recycled. Fortuitous circumstances cause Charles to visit the Library, where all human knowledge is being stored, albeit in a way that makes more sense to robots than to humans. He later encounters a group of humans who would be at home in a Mad Max movie. In the last stop of his journey, Charles visits God.

While Service Model tells a funny story, Tchaikovsky makes some serious points. To preserve humanity’s past, humans held captive in the Library make a long circular commute to engage in meaningless make-work at workplaces next to their residences. Robots were supposed to make manual labor unnecessary, but how can humans be valued in the eyes of others if they don’t work?  The novel asks whether the employment of laborers is any different from ownership of robots. When a robot stops being productive, society discards it. Are humans any different? “Individual value is tied to production, and everyone who’s idle is a parasite scrounging off the state.” The homeless are treated no better than obsolete robots.

Tchaikovsky also has an interesting take on justice. How would one program a robot to mete out justice? In the end, wouldn’t a rational robot determine that everyone is guilty of something and that humans all deserve to be punished? The notion that it’s better to punish the innocent than to allow the guilty to get away with crime is antithetical to American and British values, but common enough among people who accept the authoritarian promise to protect them from imagined threats. And who would make a better authoritarian than a robot?

The story is ultimately about Charles’ search for purpose. Charles appears to frustrate The Wonk at every turn by insisting that his purpose is to serve because that is how he was programmed. And if serving others makes Charles feel fulfilled (a possibility Charles would never articulate because he does not “feel” anything), perhaps service is his purpose. Perhaps humans also have a predetermined purpose that requires no search. Perhaps we are all wired in a particular way and Charles is simply being more honest than humans who believe they can find a purpose through religion or philosophy. Yet the ending suggests that Charles might eventually work around his programming and determine his own purpose, one his programmer did not envision.

This is the first novel of Tchaikovsky’s I’ve read that is primarily a comedy. I’ve enjoyed his space opera and fantasy, but he is just as successful at humor. Tchaikovsky borrows ideas from Star Trek, Borges, A Canticle for Liebowitz, and the Wizard of Oz (among other sources), then milks them for their comedic potential. The story can be read as a cautionary tale about the potential causes of humanity’s destruction, but the end of civilization has never been funnier.

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Tell Me Who You Are by Louisa Luna

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on June 4, 2024

Most psychological thrillers fail to take a deep dive into psychology. Tell Me Who You Are features a psychiatrist who lectures the reader about various psychological maladies, including dissociative personality disorder — commonly referred to as a multiple or split personality disorder — the existence of which is controversial. Certain characters in the novel — maybe all the important ones — might be delusional or deranged. The ambiguous truth that underlies their apparent maladies supplies the intrigue that engages the reader's interest.

Caroline Strange is a psychiatrist. Her patients call her Dr. Caroline. A local online rag published a story that included her on a list of the ten worst doctors in Brooklyn. The story was written by Ellen Garcia. It didn’t take Caroline long to find out where Ellen lived.

Some of the story is written from Caroline’s point of view. It quickly becomes apparent that she might not be a reliable narrator. Nor is she anyone a reader would want to know. She’s self-absorbed and self-important and scornful of her patients — the kind of therapist who probably belongs on a Ten Worst list. She doesn’t want to be burdened by her sons or her mother, making her self-indulgent both as a parent and as a child.

Some of the story is narrated by Gordon Strong. He was Caroline’s next-door neighbor when, as a child, she gave him some disturbing news. Not long after that, Gordon killed everyone in his house, except Caroline, who was staying overnight. Or did he?

Gordon is the most convincing character. Gordon was laid off from his job. He drinks too much. He’s portrayed as a man who is disintegrating, who has turned to alcohol to cope with his vanishing self-esteem. It doesn’t help that his father belittled him while he was growing up. Gordon progressively demolishes the hedge he’s trying to trim, the hedge perhaps serving as a symbol for his life.

Several chapters are narrated by Ellen as she’s being held captive. After a few days of captivity, Ellen launches into a monolog that amounts to “It’s hard to be a woman.” It’s well-written but too well-written to be the delirious rant of a water-deprived kidnap victim. For a woman who is starving and dehydrated, she’s way too chatty.

The meat of the story begins with a walk-in patient who tells Dr. Caroline that he thinks he’s going to kill someone. Then he says, “and I know who you really are.” The man, who calls himself Nelson, does seem to know something about Caroline’s past.

After Ellen disappears, the police question Caroline on the theory that she might resents Ellen’s unkind article about her. Caroline points the police toward Nelson as a more likely suspect. As the story unfolds, the police are more focused on Caroline than Nelson, whose existence they can’t establish. Caroline decides to track down Nelson herself.

It isn’t clear whether Nelson is in fact a criminal or the subject of Caroline’s warped delusions. I could have gone either way on that question for most of the novel. While the story is a bit farfetched, the clever plot kept me reading with interest. The story ends with a mild surprise that reflects Louisa Luna’s willingness to take chances. She understands that novels can be good even if the key characters are unlikable. Because Luna pulls off a difficult plot and fills it with difficult but carefully developed characters, Tell Me Who You Are stands apart from run-of-the-mill farfetched thrillers.

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Holy City by Henry Wise

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on June 4, 2024

“Dark” doesn’t begin to describe some of the scenes in Holy City. Child rape mostly takes place offstage, but necrophilia plays a prominent role. Holy City — the latest entry in the genre of redneck noir — is not for the faint of heart.

Tom Janders was stabbed to death, his body left in a burning house. He was living there with Ferriday (“Day”) Pace and their child, but they weren’t present when the fire was set. Deputy Will Seems happened to see smoke coming from the house and managed to retrieve Janders’ body before it was consumed by the fire. He saw Zeke Hathom running from the back of house. Sheriff Mills gave Will no choice but to arrest Zeke, even though Will has a history with the Hathom family and doesn’t believe that Zeke is a killer.

Like the sheriff, Will is white. Zeke is black. Zeke’s son Sam was Will’s childhood friend. Will has long blamed himself for not taking action to protect Sam from a vicious assault when they were both kids. He also feels that he owes the Hathom family for trying to take care of his mother. His guilt and sense of obligation seem a bit overblown to me, but they form the motivational background that explains many of Will’s actions during the novel.

Will and his father, an attorney who committed an unsolved crime that keeps him indebted to the sheriff, moved to the Holy City of Richmond more than a decade before the novel begins. Will recently returned to Euphoria County against his father’s advice. He took a job as deputy sheriff after the last deputy was encouraged to resign. Will hopes to obtain revenge against the people who assaulted Sam, but his quest is delayed by Tom Janders’ murder.

Zeke’s wife hires Bennico Watts, a private detective, to find the true killer. Bennico is a former police officer who was kicked off Richmond’s force for conducting warrantless searches in her zealous belief that catching lawbreakers is more important than obeying the law. Bennico seems out of place, contributing little to a novel that would be just as good without her.

The story eventually circles back to Sam and to the people who assaulted him in his childhood. Family secrets complicate the lives of several characters, either by burdening their lives or by changing their lives when they discover hidden truths.

The story’s darkness assures that not every character will survive. Yet it offers glimmers of light in unexpected places. One character decides that he is fated to perform menial jobs for the rest of his life, “knows this emptiness is the life he was born to complete, is soul, is what he has always known he would follow like a blood trail.” Yet he finds a measure of peace in that certainty, in achieving the daily goal of sobriety, in making vague plans to eventually reunite with people who helped him.

Another character thinks “What is life if not one unheroic sacrifice after another, until all you saw was your own failed selves like trees against the horizon.” Yet those sacrifices define his character and his memories give him comfort.

Redneck noir is often characterized by strong prose that offsets the rough dialog of characters who lack refinement. Holy City is a pleasure to read simply because the story is well told. Characters have a satisfying depth of personality and the plot is interesting, even if the killer’s surprising relationship to Will is a bit forced.

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The Noh Mask Murder by Akimitsu Tagaki

First published in Japan in 1949; published in translation by Pushkin Vertigo on June 4, 2024

Locked room mysteries are an abundant staple of Japanese crime fiction. The Noh Mask Murder is a classic example. Akimitsu Takagi published the novel shortly after World War II. A protagonist alludes to Japan’s collective shame, but the story is about murder rather than war or politics.

Akimitsu Takagi is the novel’s initial narrator. In 1946, he tells his old friend Koichi Yanagi about his idea of writing a detective story based on his firsthand account of solving an actual crime, making the novel a detective memoir. Koichi is staying at the mansion of Taijiro Chizui, whose father was a professor and also Koichi’s mentor. Taijiro’s father died of a heart attack ten years earlier. Unfortunately for the Chizui family, he may have hidden a family fortune before he died.

By chance, Koichi encounters another old friend outside Taijiro’s mansion. The friend is now a public prosecutor. They see a demon in one of the mansion’s windows and meet with Taijiro to investigate. They discover that the demon is actually a fearsome Noh mask that, according to legend, was cursed by a Noh actor.

Akimitsu gets his chance to investigate a crime when Koichi gives his name to Taijiro. Taijiro phones Koichi and tells him he has learned who is behind the mask. Akimitsu agrees to meet him immediately. Unfortunately, an “invisible killer” takes Taijiro’s life before Akimitsu can meet with him.

Taijiro died inside a locked bedroom from an apparent heart attack. The Noh mask was found on the floor. The body has been sprinkled with jasmine-scented perfume. Someone had ordered the delivery of three coffins in advance of Taijiro’s death. Before long, three coffins fall short of the family’s needs.

Akimitsu cannot solve the crimes, but the public prosecutor eventually sends him a journal — a detective memoir — that unravels the mystery. The journal was written by Koichi. After he provides a lesson in Noh theater and reviews the literature of locked room mysteries, Koichi introduces members of the Chizui family, including a madwoman who plays the piano and a monstrous man named Rintaro who scorns humanity. Only Sawako seems normal, but at 28, never permitted to love or marry, she is expected to be the lady of the house, little more than a glorified maid. Sawako’s dreams about the mask put her in fear for Koichi’s life.

One of the armchair detectives favors Sawako as the prime suspect. The other believes Rintaro to be the culprit, yet suspects abound. Several clues are found in a poem in the madwoman’s diary. A note written in shorthand provides another. An STD provides a clue that adds the possibility of incest to a dark plot. A key clue is in the phrase (repeated by two ill-fated characters) “eighty-eight in eighty-two” followed by the word Portia.

Koichi works out the locked room mystery, deduces how each victim was made to die from a heart attack, and discovers the killer’s identity while a third of the story remains to be told. The novel ends with a letter from the prosecutor, written after Koichi finished his journal, that adds a twist to Koichi’s account of the murder. A postscript to the letter adds a final surprising revelation that completes the story. As is common in Japanese mysteries, the plot is intricate and no plot threads are left dangling.

Greed or revenge are the likely motives for the murders, depending upon the killer’s identity. Takagi offers philosophical discussions about the difference between revenge and justice, illustrated with examples from feudal Japan, including the 47 Ronin. Takagi leaves it to the reader to decide whether revenge might justify the killings (or some of them) that fill the pages of The Noh Mask Murder.

Crime fiction fans don’t need to be locked room mystery fans to appreciate The Noh Mask Murder. The locked room is almost a sideshow. The story is akin to the traditional mystery in which all the suspects are assembled in a room while the detective talks through the clues and reveals the killer’s identity. Takagi provides enough suspects to keep the reader guessing as Koichi works his way through the possibilities. It is the ending, however, that gives the mystery its classic nature by forcing the reader to rethink an apparently sound solution to the killer’s identity.

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Godwin by Joseph O'Neill

Published by Pantheon on June 4, 2024

A character named Jean-Luc Lefebvre pontificates that “Sport is recreational and therefore optional. Nobody is under a duty to like it. Either it interests you or it doesn’t.” The sport that most of the world calls football has never interested me, although I have friends (most of whom were born outside of the US) who are passionate about the sport Americans call soccer. The trick that great storytellers conjure is making a reader care about a topic that is of little interest to them. Joseph O’Neill did that in Godwin, a book that is built around a potential soccer star from one of the world’s poorest nations.

While soccer is part of the novel's foundation, Godwin is more broadly about people and cultures that, while vastly different from each other in many ways, are united by the twin forces of soccer and corruption.At its heart, and more importantly, Godwin is about family, a fluid term that has differing and changing meanings.

The first section of Godwin is narrated by Mark Wolfe. Mark is a technical writer specializing in grant applications. He generally works from home and prefers to stay at home because travel and adventures “boil down to a sequence of uncontrollable, unpleasant, and unwanted events.” Those words turn out to be prescient.

Mark lives in Pittsburg and works in a cooperative of technical writers. An incident of rude behavior at his office — the kind of thing he usually avoids by working from home — is resolved by his agreement to take a leave of absence. Mark’s half-brother, Geoff Anibal, contacts him as his leave begins and asks for his help with a project in London. Mark doesn’t like Geoff but Mark’s wife Sushila convinces him that it would be good for him to spend time with his brother. Mark takes a trip to England to learn what Geoff wants. Their mutual mother lives in France but Mark has no desire to rekindle his relationship with her.

Geoff’s gig involves identifying promising soccer players (primarily from disadvantaged nations) and hooking them up with European teams. He describes himself as an intermediary or agent, depending on the services he provides, which seem to be scant. Geoff sends Mark on an adventure. It is an adventure that Mark must fund, knowing that Geoff’s promises to reimburse his expenses will come to nothing. The mission is to find a promising young soccer player named Godwin who lives in an unknown African nation and whose existence and prowess are only confirmed by a few minutes of video.

Mark’s mission generates about half the novel’s plot. In a manic mood, Mark enlists an aging French soccer agent (Lefebvre) as his partner. The partnership does not go as Mark planned. Lefebvre competes with Geoff to be the liveliest character and is by far the best storyteller.

The other half of the plot is centered on the cooperative that helps Mark earn his livelihood. Most sections of the novel that advance the plot thread are narrated by Lakesha Williams, a medical writer in the writer’s co-op. Her narrative fleshes out the cooperative’s key members, including Mark, who returns to work after his European adventure with renewed energy and purpose. Internal politics leads to a leadership change that Mark soon regrets and that leaves Lakesha feeling threatened. She will later experience conflict between her commitment to the ideals of the cooperative movement — “solidarity, self-responsibility, equity” — and her fading tolerance for new group members who are driven by a self-absorbed drive for power and dominance.

O’Neill fills the lives and backgrounds of significant characters with interesting details, from Lakesha’s initial reluctance to leave north Milwaukee to Lefebvre’s encyclopedic knowledge of soccer history. O’Neill details the cultural and political differences of the African nations that Lefebvre scouts for soccer talent. While this could the dull content of a treatise, O’Neill’s lively prose keeps the story in constant motion.

In subtle ways, O’Neill explores the world’s enduring difficulty with tribalism. One example is the co-op’s devolution from a group of supportive individuals working toward common goals to a group of battling factions. Another is the complaint of a German resident about the influx of Africans who disturb the established (white) order in his native land by increasing the demand for resources that the established order would rather not share. Another is his discussion of African nations in conflict. Far right complaints about “globalism” are reflected in conflicts between tribalism and cooperation.

In more direct ways, O’Neill explores the importance of family. Apart from Geoff, family members take on more prominent roles in the novel’s second half. Mark tolerates Suchila’s father, a racist Tamil immigrant, but he’s surprised when Suchila interferes with his family relationships by engaging in email correspondence with his mother. Surprising events tie together Mark’s mother, Geoff, Lefebre, and Mark. The story also touches upon Lakesha’s difficult relationship with her sister in Milwaukee.

We have families into which we are born, families we make for ourselves, and families that we fall into without giving the process much thought. Those concepts of family are each represented here. O’Neill recognizes that no two families are alike, but they have features in common, ranging from love and responsibility to resentment and exploitation.

The intertwined plot threads in Godwin — the search for Godwin and unrest at the co-op — come together to tell a captivating story. A surprise near the end upsets both plot threads, but they never unravel. Characters are forced to change but they endure because that’s what people do, regardless of culture or nationality. Sometimes they endure with the help of family, other times in spite of family strife. O’Neill’s ability to tell a story that is both familiar and different from any other I’ve read makes Godwin one of my favorite novels of 2024.

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