lisa_goldstein: (pic#11299236)
Big Sky, Kate Atkinson — Atkinson’s books about private detective Jackson Brodie are terrific.  Brodie, like many fictional detectives before him, has become cynical over the course of a long career, but somewhere within him is a person who still cares.  He’s also slightly befuddled by the modern world, and his observations about it are mordantly funny.  But the best parts of these books are the people around him: a Russian former trapeze artist and dominatrix (“Clowns in Russia were not funny, she said.  They aren’t here either, Jackson thought.”); two young female cops named Ronnie and Reggie, called of course the Kray twins (“‘Are you Mrs. Bragg?’ Reggie asked.  ‘Maybe,’ the woman said.  Well, you either are or you aren’t, Reggie thought.  You’re not Schrödinger’s cat.”); Jackson’s spacey actress ex-girlfriend and the mother of their child; Bunny, a drag queen; and some truly horrible criminals (“It made him think of Wendy Ives, her head bashed in with a golf club.  What kind of club? he pondered idly…. A wood, perhaps, but then you wouldn’t be looking to drive Wendy’s head any distance onto the fairway, would you?”).  As with most of these books, the characters somehow come together at the end, and major and minor puzzles are solved.

Atkinson has a tendency toward sad stories about sad families, usually with one or several murdered members.  The first book in the series, Case Histories, was almost too depressing, but the second, One Good Turn, is one of the best.  I’d suggest starting with that, but characters from one book show up in others, so completists might just as well read them straight through.  I liked Big Sky as much as any of them, which is saying a lot.

Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow — Four inventive stories about people who are marginalized and what they are forced to do just to survive.  In “Unauthorized Bread,” an immigrant finds out that her appliances restrict the kinds of products she’s allowed to use; then, when they start to fail, she has to learn how to hack her own toaster and dishwasher.  Meanwhile others in the apartment building are mobilizing in equally clever ways.  “Model Minority” is about a Superman-like character who rescues a black man from the police and discovers that his popularity suffers.  From spot-on satire Doctorow moves to a story that’s almost too painful to read, “Radicalized,” where a woman with breast cancer is told that the experimental procedure that could cure her isn’t covered by her health-care provider.  Finally, in “The Masque of the Red Death” a man builds a shelter to protect him and some others when civilization collapses.  It’s engrossing in the way end-of-the-world stories are engrossing, but it’s also a meditation about who’s “in” and who’s “out” in a society that puts hedge-fund managers at the top of the heap.  (Longer review here.)

Miranda in Milan, by Katharine Duckett — What really happened after the tempest, when Prospero and Miranda returned to Italy?  Ferdinand is only the second person Miranda has ever seen — is that really a good basis for a romance?  More importantly, maybe, is Prospero — a man who puts Miranda to sleep whenever she becomes inconvenient, who wants to be in control of everyone and everything around him — really the good guy?  Did Prospero tell Miranda the truth about his usurper-brother Antonio?

I love stories like this, that take a well-known tale and turn it inside-out while remaining true to the source.  In The Tempest Ferdinand tells Miranda that Antonio’s son has been shipwrecked with the rest of them, but the son isn’t mentioned at all at the end of the play.  Why?  Because Shakespeare forgot about him, of course, but in Duckett’s version he’s been killed — and not only that, but he’s been erased from everyone’s memory.

If Miranda in Milan just dealt with minor puzzles like this one, it would be merely clever.  But it’s also absorbing and beautifully told, and like The Tempest it has some things to say about power, what it is and how it’s gotten.

Geez, just three books for this year.  I know I read more good books than that.  Next year I’m going to record them as I read them.
lisa_goldstein: (pic#11299236)
I don’t buy hardbacks very often, and never without a lot of deliberation, but when I saw Transcription by Kate Atkinson I picked it up immediately.  Unfortunately… well, not only was it disappointing, she did something to her readers that I just don’t think is fair.  I may be making too much of this, though.

Transcription is the story of Juliet Armstrong, who is recruited by MI5 during the Second World War.  Her job interview is so slapdash it would be completely unbelievable, except that this seems to be the way the agency really worked.  These are the people who hired Kim Philby, after all, and kept him on after some pretty suspicious behavior, just because he had the same sort of background as his recruiters.

Juliet starts by transcribing the conversations of fifth columnists, but she moves quickly up the espionage ladder to the point where she’s mingling with the upper classes and sounding them out on their views.  After the war she goes to work at the BBC, where she receives a note saying, “You will pay for what you did.”  But which operation, which betrayal, is coming due?

Atkinson is usually wonderful at characterization, at interior monologues that reveal fully rounded people in all their quirky, impractical, furious, stubborn glory.  But Juliet never really leaves the page; pretty much the only thing we learn about her is that she’s a terrific liar, though we never find out why.  And Atkinson’s characters are usually very funny, with their own unique ways of making sense of the world, but Juliet’s sole eccentricity seems to be that she dislikes cliches, especially cliches about eyes and ears: “You have a good ear,” a character tells her, to which she says, “I have two, sir.”  After a while she sounds like that pedantic English teacher you had in high school, the one who went off on tangents while everyone else fidgeted in their seats and stopped listening.

The unfair thing…well, in the interests of not giving too much away I can only say that at the end we learn something new about Juliet.  This is something that Juliet has known the whole time, and, more importantly, that the narrator has known the whole time, and the only reason for bringing it out at the end is to surprise the reader.  That strategy might make sense if the book were in first person, if Juliet were telling the story and trying to hide her secret from the reader and the world (like that Agatha Christie novel I don’t want to name, because even naming it might spoil it.  You probably know the one I mean, though).  But there’s no reason for an objective narrator not to give us this information along with everything else.  And there’s very little that leads up to it; in fact, if you come across someone who says they knew what was happening before the end you have my permission to call them an arrant liar.

So am I just being cranky, like Juliet and her problem with cliches?  Or is this truly a breach of the reader-author contract?

Profile

lisa_goldstein: (Default)
lisa_goldstein

January 2025

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
192021 22232425
262728293031 

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 9th, 2025 04:07 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios