The Train of Small Mercies by David Rowell

Published by Putnam on October 13, 2011

It's tricky to write a novel that weaves together the separate stories of an ensemble cast. Done well, the different viewpoints cohere into a meaningful whole. (I thought Colum McCann did it masterfully in Let the Great World Spin, using a tightrope walk as the focal point to intertwine stories of disparate lives.) Done poorly, the technique makes a novel read like a collection of unrelated stories. The Train of Small Mercies falls somewhere in the middle.

Robert Kennedy's funeral train is the novel's binding thread. On his first day as a porter, Lionel Chase is assigned to the train as it departs from New York. Maeve McDerdon has traveled to Washington to interview for a position as the Kennedys' nanny, an interview that is cancelled after Bobby's assassination. Delores King in Pennsylvania doesn't want her husband to know that she's taking their daughter to see the train but suffers a misfortune that threatens to expose her plan.

In New Jersey, young Michael Colvert (having returned home after his noncustodial father took him for an unauthorized visit) and his friends reenact the Kennedy assassination in their back yard. Edwin Rupp, his wife, and another Delaware couple plan to watch the train pass, but Edwin is more interested in his new above-ground pool (and in his friend's wife). The train will pass the home of Jamie West, a young man who returned from Vietnam with a missing leg, on the day he's being interviewed by a local reporter.

For many Americans, Bobby Kennedy represented hope in a time of turmoil. An unpopular war, urban unrest, and changing views of race and gender contributed to a shared anxiety that was heightened by the assassination of Martin Luther King. David Rowell conveys a sense of a nation in crisis at the moment of Kennedy's death, yet his characters (realistically enough) are distracted by their own problems. Unfortunately, their stories are too often half-formed, amounting to vignettes of life on the East Coast, interesting but lacking significance.

The narrative jumps maddeningly from character to character. Perhaps David Rowell believes readers have such limited attention spans that they can only handle a few paragraphs of character development before they itch to move on to someone else. The technique gives the story a fragmented quality that made it impossible to feel as if I truly understood any of the characters. None of their stories are resolved -- at least two are left hanging in the midst of a personal calamity -- making it even more difficult to form an appreciation of their connection to a larger story. While Rowell's characters are not without depth, the fragmented nature of the storytelling undermines the novel's themes.

The Train of Small Mercies is at its best when it explores marriage and relationships in the 1960s. Delores yearns for independence but lacks the courage to tell her politically conservative husband that she plans to watch the funeral train. Maeve has achieved an uncertain independence by leaving her family in Boston (the city in which they made a home after leaving Ireland) but, despite enjoying the power of flirtation, feels isolated in Washington, having befriended only the hotel concierge.

Other characters exist as sketches more than fully formed characters. Through his conversations with his father and other porters, Lionel serves as a reminder of the importance of Bobby Kennedy to black Americans, but he has little life of his own. Jamie is a stand-in for the soldiers who returned from Vietnam with maimed bodies and broken spirits, but he has no significant role in the story beyond his iconic status. We know almost nothing of Michael beyond the pain that resulted from his parents' broken marriage. He lies down in the path of the oncoming train in a scene that lacks the drama Rowell must have intended, in part because we know too little about him to understand his motivations. The Rupps and their swimming pool contribute almost nothing to the story.

Rowell writes deft prose. He clearly had the germ of a strong novel in mind. Unfortunately, the germ didn't grow into a more complex organism. Enough of the story works to merit a recommendation, but this isn't a novel I can recommend with enthusiasm.

RECOMMENDED

Ghost on Black Mountain by Ann Hite

Published by Gallery Books on September 13, 2011

Part One of Ghost on Black Mountain combines a ghost story with that of an abused woman who must decide whether and how to confront her abuser.  The tale is told in the first person by Nellie Clay.  Nellie’s mother warns her not to marry Hobbs Pritchard, but Nellie is seventeen, innocent, and certain she will lose her chance at love if she doesn’t accept Hobbs’ proposal.  After a one day courtship, Nellie marries Hobbs and moves into his house on Black Mountain.  She quickly realizes that Hobbs is a hard, ill-tempered, unloving man.  Nellie’s problems are compounded when a young girl named Shelly, dispatched by Hobbs’ aunt to help Nellie clean the house, tells Nellie that a ghost is roaming its rooms.  Nellie soon encounters not just the ghost in the house, but another who lurks in the woods.  Nellie eventually puzzles out the connection between the two ghosts and discovers parallels between her life and the life of Hobbs’ deceased mother.

Part One is written in a convincing first person Southern Appalachian voice, although it occasionally betrays an eloquence that is inconsistent with Nellie’s unsophisticated grammar.  The story plods a bit when Nellie starts to keep a diary, filling pages with “how could God let this happen to me?” musings.  Several well executed scenes let us see that Nellie is unhappy; reading her hand-wringing diary entries adds nothing new.  I was also unconvinced by Nellie’s reaction to the haunting; for a person who claims not to believe in ghosts, Nellie seems surprisingly unperturbed when they show up and start chatting with her.

Part Two is told in the first person by Nellie’s mother, Josie Clay.  Josie tells us that we need to know her story to understand how Nellie “got herself into the mess she did,” but Josie’s story actually gives us little insight into Nellie’s life beyond showing us Nellie’s early exposure to yet another ghost.  Part Three is narrated by Shelly Parker, the girl who helped Nellie clean her house.  Shelly has a gift for seeing haints but isn’t happy about it when Hobbs’ various victims begin to pester her about Nellie.  Shelly’s narrative, like Josie’s, does little to advance the story, and she all but disappears from the novel after Part Three concludes.

The first half of Ghost on Black Mountain is more remarkable for its setting and atmosphere than for the story it tells.  The novel’s second half is better.  Part Four is narrated by Hobbs’ lover, Rose Gardner. Although Rose is only fourteen, hers is the first story told by an educated character; the change of voice was welcome.  She’s the one person who remains unchanged by her association with Hobbs and is, I think, the most interesting character.  Iona Harbor narrates Part Five.  She’s fifteen in 1955 (more than a dozen years after the conclusion of Part Four), living with her family in Georgia.  The connection between Iona’s story and the rest of the novel becomes apparent only after we learn that Iona’s mother (who narrates Part Six) carries with her a secret past.  An improbably coincidental meeting in Part Five joins Iona to one of the characters introduced in Part Four while Part Six brings the story full circle. 

What begins as a seemingly predicable ghost story evolves into an unconventional novel of greater depth.  Ann Hite’s characters and winning prose style impressed me immediately, but I didn’t warm to the story until its midway point. Fortunately, the addition of Rose and Iona to the cast saves the novel from mediocrity.  The coincidental meeting in Part Five is essential to the plot but requires an even greater suspension of disbelief than the chatty ghosts.  I’m not a fan of convenient coincidences but, in this case, it makes for a good story.

Themes of forgiveness and redemption permeate the novel’s concluding chapters, but the need to face the consequences of one’s choices is the book’s strongest theme.  After a slow start (frankly, I think the novel would have been better without the ghosts), Hite won me over with her appealing story and memorable characters. 

RECOMMENDED

Slash and Burn by Matt Hilton

Published by Harper on October 25, 2011

Some of the blurbs for Slash and Burn compare Joe Hunter to Jack Reacher. Hunter is like a copy made on a Xerox machine that's out of toner. Lee Childs' Reacher is an action hero who is capable of subtle thought. Matt Hilton's Hunter is about as subtle as a hand grenade.

The plot can be summarized in a few words because there's so little of it. An NYPD officer named Kate Piers hires tough guy Joe Hunter to help her find her missing sister, a woman who is in trouble with a sinister character in Kentucky. As they pursue the sister, Kate is taken captive. Hunter recruits two tough guy friends to help him find Kate (and her sister) which can only be accomplished by killing a mess of people, although most of the killing is done by Hunter alone, causing his friends to complain that they weren't part of the fun. Cars explode, a helicopter crashes, lots of people die. The story is all in the title: Slash and Burn.

Like many tough guy heroes, Hunter is insufferably self-righteous. That can be an interesting character trait in a novel of greater depth, but depth is not a strong point of Slash and Burn. In common with other vigilante tough guys, Hunter defines himself by his sense of honor. He tells us that he takes pride in not shooting someone who is running away from him, even knowing that the person will later try to kill him. Yet just pages earlier, Hunter shoots a man in the head who is sitting helpless and dazed behind the wheel of a crashed car because the man could conceivably recover sufficiently to emerge from the car, arm himself, and distract Hunter as he tries to kill several other bad guys who are gunning for him. Apart from Hunter's flexible notions about shooting the helpless, the concept of a vigilante with a meaningful moral code is a joke (there's nothing moral about murdering someone simply because the vigilante decides he deserves killing, or shooting a man between the legs because the man "raped a woman's mind"), but the glorification of the moral vigilante is standard fare in tough guy fiction. The best tough guy characters are either amoral -- they don't care if their actions are right or wrong -- or recognize the inconsistency of their moral standards and are troubled by their actions. Hunter has none of that complexity. He's a remarkably boring killing machine.

As is customary in the worst tough guy fiction, the bad guys are cartoons, so obviously evil that the reader will cheer when they are killed by our vigilante hero. And killed they are. When the heroic tough guy gets into a shootout with six bad guys in a novel like this, you know the good tough guy will escape with a flesh wound while his adversaries are felled by bullets placed between their eyes. A novel with this much action shouldn't be dull, but Slash and Burn is so unimaginative that it was putting me to sleep.

Final complaint: Hunter has no problem carrying his guns onto airplanes because he has false documents identifying him as an air marshal. We're asked to believe that neither TSA nor the flight crews ever wonder why they weren't notified that an armed air marshal would be taking a particular flight. That implausible explanation for Hunter's ability to fly while armed smacks of lazy writing.

Do I have anything positive to say? Hilton writes in a reasonably fluid prose style. The pace is quick. The novel is easy to read. It just isn't interesting.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad

Published by Riverhead on October 13, 2011

Times are changing for the nomadic tribes that move with the seasons between Pakistan and Afghanistan, leading sheep and camels to new grazing lands. Both nations now demand travel documents that tribal members with no birth certificates cannot obtain. The nomads consider themselves citizens of all countries, or none; they have no wish to be rooted. The conflict between ancient traditions of tribal life and the evolving demands of government is the most interesting theme developed in The Wandering Falcon. Another theme concerns the difficult lives endured by tribal women. Sadly, the novel's themes are stronger than the story it tells.

At the age of five, a boy who comes to be known as Tor Baz watches his father shoot his mother in the back to save her from the fate that his father will soon endure. Baz then watches as members of the Siahpad tribe stone his father to death to avenge his parents' sinful insult to the Siahpad: his father, a camel herder, fell in love with his mother, the wife of his father's employer, and fled with her across the barren land, hiding at a military outpost for five years before being discovered. The Siahpad leave Baz to die in the harsh environment, where he is found by a traveling party of Baluchs, desert-dwelling rebels against a government that has usurped the power of their tribal chiefs. Tor Baz is the novel's recurring character, although he disappears from time to time as other characters emerge. More than once as the story progresses, Tor Baz begins his life anew.

In the first two or three chapters, the elegant simplicity of Jamil Ahmad's writing style and the evocative landscape he creates reminded me of J.M. Coetzee. Unfortunately, that's where the comparison ends. While Coetzee's novels inspire the reader to draw larger truths from small, personal stories, Ahmad tells the reader too much. As is often true, the novel is at its best when it spotlights individual lives. When Ahmad attempts to broaden the story to encompass the plight of entire tribes, his narration becomes a bit heavy-handed. The novel shines when Ahmad uses individual characters to explore tribal customs and the political relationships between tribes and governments. When Ahmad pauses to comment upon the problems of nomadic groups around the world, the story loses its momentum and the novel suffers.

Too often, the story loses its focus. A chapter describing a kidnapping of urban dwellers by tribesmen (Tor Baz plays a tangential role as an informant) illustrates the political dynamic between the tribes and the government but contributes little to plot development. In a middle chapter, point of view abruptly shifts from third person to first as a German man whose father was born into a tribe describes his visit to the land of his father's youth (Tor Baz is one of his guides). The abrupt change in point of view to that of a new character was jarring. The German serves as a vehicle for more stories about tribal politics, particularly about the tribes' shifting roles during the Second World War, but does nothing to advance the story. In the remaining chapters, point of view returns to third person. The next two chapters introduce new characters (women who are treated as property), setting up a final chapter that brings Tor Baz back to the forefront. The ever-changing storylines, only some of which tie together to form a coherent whole, give the novel a disjointed feel.

In the end, I appreciated The Wandering Falcon for its educational value, but I formed no emotional attachment to it -- or rather, I lost the attachment I was beginning to form in the early chapters after the story lost sight of Tor Baz. We never get to know any character well, while Tor Baz, although positioned as the central character, remains an undeveloped enigma. This book might have worked better as a collection of short stories. Still, the strong writing and fascinating cultural issues make The Wandering Falcon well worth reading.

RECOMMENDED

The Dog Who Knew Too Much by Spencer Quinn

Published by Atria Books on September 6, 2011

A detective story narrated by a dog.  What could be better?  Apart from his impressive understanding of the English language and his ability to narrate books, Chet is very much a dog:  loyal, forgetful, easily distracted, always hungry, fascinated by odors and averse to loud noises, often puzzled by humans but usually willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.  Chet prefers a clear head to deep thought.  He’s a literal thinker:  when he hears that someone is wearing ratty clothing, Chet looks for the rats; when he hears he’s in a one-horse town, Chet looks for the horse; when someone comments that a character’s behavior stinks, Chet wonders why he can’t smell it.

Chet’s partner in the Little Detective Agency is Bernie Little. Bernie is hired to protect a woman from her ex-husband.  The mission changes when the woman’s son disappears on a camping trip.  With Chet’s help, Bernie searches for the missing boy (searching for things, particularly hot dogs, is a task at which Chet excels).  When the search leads to the discovery of a murder victim in a gold mine, Bernie begins to suspect that the woman hasn’t been wholly truthful about the reason he was hired.  A conspiracy is soon unveiled that threatens to separate Chet from Bernie.  As the story progresses, Chet has some solo adventures while maintaining a stream of consciousness commentary on items of interest to the canine nation.

This isn’t the kind of book you want to overanalyze.  Spencer Quinn has a dry sense of humor that matches my own.  He’s a keen observer of dogs; his take on how dogs think kept me laughing from the first page to the last.  The Dog Who Knew Too Much is meant as an entertaining romp and that’s the spirit in which I enjoyed it.  This is apparently the fourth in a series of Chet and Bernie books.  I’m so in love with Chet it made me want to read them all.

RECOMMENDED