In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 7, 2012

The banyan tree in the courtyard represented a place of safety in war-torn Cambodia for seven-year-old Raami and the royal family to which she belongs -- at least it did until the Khmer Rouge chased the family members from their home.  The Khmer Rouge soldiers are in the vanguard of a “revolution” that, in the mid-1970s, turns Raami’s family into refugees.  Raami’s father, Ayuravann, is a prince and a poet, her grandmother is a queen, but these distinctions merely put the family at greater risk than the displaced peasants they soon join.

In the Shadow of the Banyan is a stirring account of Raami’s young life under the control of the Khmer Rouge.  The Khmer Rouge leaders do not want any Cambodian to remain rooted; individuals must be replanted, must take on new lives in service to the Revolution.  When her family is divided and forced to relocate to a rural village, Raami begins her life anew, concealing her past and watching as friends and relatives -- the ones who aren’t killed by soldiers -- die of malnutrition and disease.  Having been stricken with polio in early childhood, Raami’s limp saves her from the arduous labor to which most villagers are assigned, but nothing can spare her the grief of loss or the pain of hunger.

Vaddey Ratner’s novel is rooted in her own experience as a child in Cambodia.  It tells an emotionally intense story of courage and sacrifice.  While the story is often tragic, rebirth and transformation are the novel’s strongest themes.  Another striking theme is the commonality of man, the shared dignity of rich and poor, royalty and peasant.   “We are all echoes of one another,” Ayuravaan tells Raami, a truth the novel vividly illustrates.

Images of hope and beauty balance the despair that pervades the story. Despite the devastation she must endure daily, Raami never forgets that she is surrounded by beauty. She discovers that a momentary glimpse of the commonplace -- a dragonfly in flight -- can turn the ordinary into something beautiful. “We are capable of extraordinary beauty if we dare to dream,” says Auyravaan as he encourages Raami to dream of flight, to soar with spreading wings, to overcome her disability and the external strictures that govern her life. Although similar metaphors often descend into cheesiness in the hands of uninspired writers, Ratner avoids crossing that line by anchoring her story in truth while avoiding artistic manipulation.

The novel’s imagery is astonishing.  A farmer carves a calf from wood to hang around a cow’s neck, not to replace the mourning cow’s dead calf but “to give shape to her sorrow” -- the kind of sorrow Raami comes to understand all too well.  Recurring images -- serpents, birds in flight, the moon, gardens, mirthful spirits, an epic poem called Reamker, and (of course) banyan trees -- give shape and context to Cambodian life, connecting past to present.  So do the charming folk tales the characters tell each other.

Despite the well-documented atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, Ratner writes of individual “revolutionaries” with perception:  they are often just kids, too immature to understand the consequences of their behavior, following the Movement only because it is easier to carry a gun than to push a plow.  Big Uncle says they are “like boys playing war.”  They are illiterate, resentful of the educated, unaware of the “cause” their revolution supposedly intends to achieve.  They glorify violence to mask their own ignorance.  Given her experiences, it is a tribute to Ratner that she writes of them with such understanding.

Ratner is a graceful writer.  Her sentences flow with balletic precision.  Her word choice is impeccable.  Even if the story had been less captivating, I would recommend this novel for the beauty of its prose.  Every now and then Ratner includes a word in Raami’s native language.  Its meaning is usually apparent from the context, but even when its meaning is obscure, Ratner resists the temptation to interrupt the narrative flow with an English translation.  That might bother some readers but I’m more bothered by writers who can’t use a foreign word without immediately supplying an English translation.

In short, this is a stunning work, a powerful story skillfully told.  Although grounded in Ratner’s personal experience, it reads like the product of a seasoned novelist.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch

Published by Del Rey on July 31, 2012

Quantum entanglement is just pixie dust with the word quantum thrown in.  That, at least, is Constable Peter Grant’s explanation of magic.  Whether magic is caused by quantum entanglement or pixie dust, Grant is slowly learning to master it, a hobby that serves him well in his career with London’s Metropolitan Police.  He is assigned to the Folly, the hush-hush department (known more formally as the Specialist Assessment Unit) charged with investigating cases when “things get weird.”  Things get weird when an American named James Gallagher is stabbed to death with a sharp bit of pottery in London’s Underground -- weird in part because it isn’t clear how Gallagher got into the tunnel (his staggering exit at one of the platforms is captured on CCTV).

Something odd is taking place beneath the surface of London and it’s up to Grant to connect the underground madness to Gallagher’s death.  The mystery takes Grant (together with boss Nightingale and apprentice Lesley) on a tour of the Underground’s tunnels and London’s sewers.  A variety of magical types turn up to provide assistance or trouble (or both), including river goddesses, an Earthbender, and a half-fairy (on his father’s side).  And then there are the mysterious dwellers below London’s surface….

Grant is sort of a neophyte magician so the novel is relatively light on magic -- a good thing, from my perspective.  I’m more partial to detective work and/or humor than spell-casting and ghost-busting.  The familiar elements of a police procedural give the novel its shape and keep it moving forward at a steady pace.  Still, I recommend Whispers Under Ground not so much for its convoluted whodunit plot but for Ben Aaronovitch’s humor.   Aaronovitch’s take on law enforcement officers is consistently amusing and his good-hearted American-bashing (like his French-bashing) is priceless.

Whispers Under Ground is written with enough attitude to keep the story interesting even when it lags, as it does from time to time.  Unlike the London Underground, the plot doesn’t consistently stay on track.  Grant’s burial by the Earthbender, for instance, leads to an extended scene of no clear relevance.  It is one of a few passages that add nothing to the narrative.  Still, Aaronovitch’s snappy prose held my attention even when the story didn’t.

Aaronovitch makes occasional references to events that occurred in earlier novels in the series.  Having not read the earlier installments, those references baffled me.  I don’t think it’s necessary to read the earlier novels to understand this one, but doing so would provide helpful context.  Fortunately, although I sometimes felt like an outsider who didn’t understand the novel’s in-jokes, Aaronovitch coaxed a smile or a snicker on nearly every page, and that sufficed to earn my recommendation of this offbeat novel.

RECOMMENDED

The Snow Bees by Peter Cunningham

First published in Great Britain in 1988 

Peter Cunningham is an extraordinary writer of moving family dramas, including the Monument novels, set in rural Ireland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also written more than a half dozen thrillers, including The Snow Bees.

The Snow Bees is a standard story of drug cops battling drug lords with a slight twist: the man who infiltrates the cartel, Patrick Drake, is an accountant, not a cop. Drake volunteers for the assignment after his brother-in-law, Alan Ridgeway, a fellow accountant in the same prestigious London firm, is murdered at a winery he was auditing in France. Ridgeway had discovered that the winery was shipping more wine than it produced. He suspected that the winery was involved in illicit activity and that the accounting firm's founder, John Abelson, was involved.

In a related plotline, a DEA agent working undercover in Spain is murdered, but not before telling his brother, D.C. drug cop Joe Vendetti, that someone high in the DEA's hierarchy was working with the cartel. It is Vendetti who recruits Drake to infiltrate the cartel. The novel's other key player is drug lord Marcellino Adarraga, who lives in Columbia but dreams of freeing his homeland, Euskadi, and uses his profits to fund Basque terrorists.

Patrick manages to join the cartel with improbable ease, and the relationship he develops with Adarraga's beautiful lover is both predictable and unlikely. As was customary twenty years ago, the "good guys" in The Snow Bees indulge in a fair amount of overwrought hand-wringing about the evils of cocaine. Notwithstanding those concerns and despite the all-too-conventional plot, The Snow Bees tells a rousing story that features strong characters and tense moments. Cunningham writes with the same grace and style that make the Monument novels so memorable. The Snow Bees is far from Cunningham's best work -- it hasn't aged as well as his other novels -- but the quality of Cunningham's writing and the excitement that he manages to generate make it worth reading.

RECOMMENDED

The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H. Cook

Published by Mysterious Press on August 7, 2012 

Thomas Cook's books are always filled with penetrating insights, sharp observations of human nature. Deception and betrayal, common themes in Cook's novels, percolate from the center of The Crime of Julian Wells. Although the story is driven by a secret -- what is the crime to which the title refers? -- it is the reaction to betrayal, its poisonous impact ("like a landslide in your soul"), that gives the story its heart.

The Crime of Julian Wells begins with Julian's suicide. The suicide baffles Julian's best friend, Philip Anders, from whose perspective the story is told. Philip is a literary critic, while Julian was an expatriate writer mired in darkness who traveled the world to chronicle stories of crime and cruelty. "It was evil he was after," Philip recalls, "some core twist in the scheme of things." Also confounded by Julian's decision to end his life is Julian's sister Loretta. While Philip and Loretta both knew Julian to be restless but exuberant in his youth, they also recognized that Julian's state of mind changed after he traveled with Philip to Argentina.

The dedication in Julian's first book -- "For Philip, sole witness to my crime" -- had always seemed to Philip a joke. Julian's death causes Philip to reconsider its meaning. Obsessed with the notion that he had, in fact, witnessed a crime he failed to recognize, Philip scours his memory while embarking on his own investigation, a quest that makes him ponder the fate of two people he met in Argentina toward the end of the Dirty War, friends who subsequently disappeared: Father Rodrigo, who appeared to be a poor parish priest, and Marisol Menendez, a tour guide who assisted Julian and Philip. Following the trail from a seedy bar in Paris to a hotel bar in London favored by spies and zigzagging across the globe from there, Philip endeavors to uncover the secrets that his friends had concealed.

How does one destroy a monster, one of the characters asks Philip, without becoming a monster? Julian spent his adult life trying to identify with the victims of monsters in the hope that he could tell their stories. Through much of the novel Cook invites the reader to ask whether Julian's crime, whatever it was, made him a monster or a victim -- or both. Using a particularly clever device, Cook develops Julian's personality through the books Julian wrote. Philip rereads them after Julian's death, and the passages he quotes furnish insight into Julian's life while providing clues to his fate. His search for the truth about Julian leads Philip to some unpleasant truths about his own life.

Philip frequently alludes to (or quotes from) novelists and poets and travel writers. He often references Eric Ambler, an author with whom Cook has much in common. Like Ambler, Cook is as much a philosopher as a writer of suspense novels. He illuminates the shadows that darken the human heart. With the clarity of truth that the best fiction supplies, Cook reveals not just the pain that drove Julian to his death, but the pain that is common to all who have been broken by deception and betrayal.

Cook's plot is constructed with precision. His characters come alive with the virtues and flaws that define a life. His radiant prose is forceful and direct; this is not a novelist who wastes words. Few authors of literary suspense novels can match Cook. The Crime of Julian Wells is not Cook's best book, but it is a strong addition to his impressive body of work.

RECOMMENDED

vN by Madeline Ashby

Published by Angry Robot on July 31, 2012 

Jack’s wife Charlotte and daughter Amy are von Neumann-type humanoids.  The vN were created by religious folk who thought it would be nice for the unsaved to have some helpers after being left behind.  That’s an original premise, albeit an unlikely one --  given that those who aren’t called to God’s side during the End Times are by definition unworthy of salvation, are religious extremists likely to devote resources to making their sinful lives more comfortable?  If you can suspend your disbelief of that premise, the offbeat story that follows is full of entertaining surprises.

A less original premise (thanks to Isaac Asimov) is that a vN can never harm a human; a failsafe causes the vN to suffer if it sees a human in pain.  That premise is tested by Amy’s grandmother (Portia) and other members of her clade, who seem perfectly content to cause havoc in the human population.

Amy engages in an act of humanoid cannibalism, busts out of jail, and watches a male vN give birth to a baby -- all in the first couple of chapters.  Amy also contends with bounty hunters and rapidly emerging breasts while trying to ignore Portia’s ever-present nagging voice, which she has internalized for reasons that are (like many of the novel’s events) bizarre.  Later she meets up with a vN named Javier who has a history of giving birth to children before abandoning them.

At times vN has the flavor of a comic book, complete with a super-powered heroine.  There’s also an element of silliness -- maybe you could call it playfulness -- that pervades the story.  To some extent the story is a family drama, albeit one in which most members of the featured families (Amy’s and Javier’s) are mechanical.  To some extent the novel is a love story.  It is in part an action/adventure story, in part a comedy, in a part a science fiction story that is light on the science.  For all its strangeness -- including an ending that, like the rest of the story, I would never have predicted -- there is a poignancy that breaks through in the final chapters and comes to dominate everything else.  I was uncertain how I felt about vN in the novel’s first half, but it grew on me as the story progressed and as I came to appreciate the characters.

vN follows memes that are commonplace in science fiction:  whether intelligent sentience entitles a humanoid to human rights; whether freedom is simply the ability to say no.  It expands the last question in an interesting way by asking whether freedom for an AI is the ability to harm a human.  On the other hand, perhaps true freedom (for human and humanoid alike) is the ability to experience joy -- or love.

vN also touches on serious issues not frequently addressed in science fiction, including pedophilia and the perils of democracy (at least when tyrannical decisions are made democratically by vN).  Still, this isn’t a story that a reader is encouraged to take too seriously.  It is enjoyable, lively, and sweet, with just enough profundity to make the story worth thinking about after the fun ends.

RECOMMENDED