A review of Believing the Lie, by Elizabeth George

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

I’ve enjoyed most of Elizabeth George’s 16 previous novels about the life and career of Thomas Lynley, an hereditary earl from Cornwall who has risen to the post of Detective Inspector in Scotland Yard. Like all of George’s characters, Lynley is a finely drawn and three-dimensional — likeable, without being the sort of person you’d expect to pal around with. Her settings, usually picturesque corners of rural England, are engaging in their own right. George clearly does her homework — she’s American, after all — so that her books are popular in the UK, not just the U.S.

Maybe what I most enjoy about Elizabeth George’s writing is the utter unpredictability of her stories. She consciously avoids working in the old Agatha Christie mode of murder tales. For example, consider this passage from Believing the Lie:

“For an utterly mad moment Lynley thought the woman was actually confessing to murdering her husband’s nephew. The setting, after all, was perfect for it, in the best tradition of more than one hundred years of tea-in-the-vicarage and murder-in-the-library paperback novels sold in railway stations. He couldn’t imagine why she might be confessing, but he’d also never been able to understand why the characters in those novels sat quietyly in the drawing room or the sitting room or the library while a detective laid out all the clues leading to the guilt of one of them. No one ever demanded a solicitor in the midst of the detective’s maundering. He’d never been able to sort that one out.”

So, if you pick up a copy of Believing the Lie, prepare yourself for a rollercoaster of a story, resplendent with more than its share of surprises. When Inspector Lynley is despatched to Cumbria to look into the murder of the nephew of a rich and powerful man, you might expect a straightforward tale of crime and punishment. What you’ll get instead is a complex tale of intrigue, adultery, family secrets, betrayal, and a host of other themes involving a wealthy manufacturing family, a tabloid reporter, a stunning Argentine woman, Lynley’s friends Deborah and Simon, and, of course, Lynley’s interior dialogue about his murdered wife. You’ll also witness the untimely deaths of two people. But don’t expect anything to go the way you think it will.

A review of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Only the very best nonfiction attains the depths of understanding and insight to be found in the finest novels. Tracy Kidder, Erik Larson, and a handful of others writing today in the English language often achieve this. Now comes Katherine Boo, who joins them with her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

This enthralling and deeply disturbing book reads like a novel. Its setting is a small slum called Annawadi housing some 3,000 people, nestled between the new Mumbai International Airport and the five-star hotels clustered nearby. During the three-year period she studied, Boo focuses on the experiences of two families, one a familiy of 11 Muslim immigrants from India’s north who have built a business as garbage-brokers, buying up the trash collected by nearby scavengers, mostly children, then sorting and selling it to recyclers. The other family is affiliated with Shiv Sena, one of the most extreme and violent anti-Muslim political parties in India.

Boo’s purpose in studying life in Annawadi is to understand poverty and the ways people find to transcend it. But to put this book in perspective, Boo reveals early on that “almost no one in this slum was considered poor by official Indian benchmarks. Rather, the Annawadians were among roughly one hundred million Indians freed from poverty since 1991.” As anyone truly familiar with rural India can attest, in most respects conditions are far worse in many of the country’s 800,000 villages than in its urban slums. That’s partly because the oppressive bonds of caste bind more tightly in the countryside, which is notoriously resistant to change, than in the cities, where many of India’s poorest farmworkers flee to seek a better life. Still, that “better life” is elusive because “only six of the slum’s three thousand residents had permanent jobs.”

Women and children take center stage in Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and Boo’s most faithful and reliable sources are children. As she explained in a presentation last evening for the World Affairs Council of San Francisco, children are far less likely than adults to be influenced by the considerations of religion, caste, or politics that so often color adults’ remarks about their neighbors.

Boo is a staff writer for The New Yorker. However, as if that isn’t credential enough, she’s also a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter, winner of a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and a MacArthur Fellow (a recipient of a “genius” award). Behind the Beautiful Forevers represents three years of work in the slums of Mumbai, carrying her two-decade-long study of poverty and its remedies from the United States to Asia.

A review of Incendiary, by Chris Cleave

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

This entirely original and deeply troubling first novel is written in the voice of an unnamed working class Englishwoman, bright but poorly educated. For starters, she doesn’t have a clue about commas, or just about any other punctuation, for that matter. At first, what seem to be her run-on sentences are jarring, even off-putting. But the story is powerful, and the language shortly becomes easier to take. Before you know it, you’re hooked.

Incendiary is structured as an open letter to Osama bin Laden from a devastated young mother whose husband and young son have died in a massive terrorist attack on a soccer game in London. The book’s four sections cover events in the spring, when the attack occurs, and in the succeeding summer, fall, and winter of one terrible year, perhaps the worst in London’s history. But here’s how the narrator puts it all in context:

“You’ve hurt London Osama but you haven’t finished it you never will. London’s like me it’s too piss poor and ignorant to know when it’s finished. That morning when I looked down at the sun rising through the docklands I knew it for sure. I am London Osama I am the whole world. Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.”

However, this statement comes early in the novel. D0n’t get the impression Incendiary is uplifting. It’s profoundly unsettling, both in its devastating impact on the narrator herself and on English society.

Incendiary appeared in bookstores the day of the terrorist attack on the London Underground. The book won numerous awards and was published in 20 countries.

After reading Incendiary, I was surprised to learn that Chris Cleave is a man. His protagonist is so quintessentially female that it’s difficult to understand anyone who pees standing up could have created her. It’s also notable that Cleave is a columnist for the Guardian (Manchester Guardian to us oldtimers), since journalism, and journalistic ethics, figure so crucially in this first novel.

A review of The Fear Index, by Robert Harris

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

We have yet to grasp more than a hint of the forces unleashed by the creation of the Internet and, more recently, the World Wide Web. The Fear Index dramatizes one possible chain of events that could upend human society.

This chilling novel is set in Geneva, home of CERN, the European scientific research center that houses the Large Hadron Collider and which spawned the World Wide Web in 1991. There, an extraordinarily brilliant and eccentric American physicist, Dr. Alexander Hoffmann, exercised his passion for artificial intelligence (AI) for several years until his experiments ran afoul of his superiors at the lab. Shortly afterward, Hoffmann entered into a partnership with Hugo Quarry, an English financier who volunteered to provide him with the virtually unlimited data needed to pursue his research. Their partnership, a hedge fund, is based on Hoffman’s evolving AI research. The fund quickly grew to multibillion-dollar proportions because of the accuracy of the securities-trading algorithms developed by Hoffmann and his band of eccentric young mathematical researchers.

Though this novel may come across as sheer fantasy, and Harris’ depiction of AI is off base in some respects, it’s grounded in reality. Many hedge funds do conduct automatic trading using algorithms to make decisions by the millisecond. And the events that dominate The Fear Index bear an unsettling resemblance to a very dark day in Wall Street’s recent history.

The action starts quickly in The Fear Index and builds steadily to a crescendo in a deply troubling conclusion. A synopsis of the action would make little sense. Read it yourself, and you’ll probably have trouble putting it down.

The Fear Index is British writer Robert Harris’ 14th book. His previous seven novels were Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, and The Ghost (released as a feature film under the title The Ghost Writer). If those titles seem familiar, it’s no accident: every one sold well, some were bestsellers, and several were adapted for film or television.

A review of A Theory of Small Earthquakes, by Meredith Maran

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

It seems highly unlikely that I fit the profile of the intended readership for this first novel from Berkeley writer Meredith Maran. But I couldn’t resist, because (a) Meredith is a friend, (b) she’s also a former employee (who, by the way, once termed me her “least worst boss”), (c) the book is set largely in Berkeley, where I’ve lived for more than forty years, and (d) it spans much of the time I’ve lived here, so I was bound to enjoy the local color.

Meredith’s writing — she is the author of ten previous books, both memoir and nonfiction — is distinguished by painful emotional honesty. Ask anyone who knows Meredith: she tells it like it is. Or, to paraphrase one of the characters in this novel, Meredith doesn’t do nice. She does true. Her memoirs and journalistic efforts alike dig deeply into difficult issues that tend to hide behind headlines. A Theory of Small Earthquakes is no different. And, to my mind, the greatest virtue of good writing is honesty.

A Theory of Small Earthquakes centers on the decades-long love affair of Alison Rose, a writer with many similarities to Meredith herself, and Zoe, a trust-fund baby and artist given to outrageous clothing and hairstyles and large, disturbing canvases. Ambivalent about raising children with two mothers but determined to have children, Alison falls into a lustful relationship with Mark, one of her editors. She and Mark try to raise their son, Corey, in a household that’s just about as normal as it gets in Berkeley (which isn’t saying much). At length, though, Alison and Mark draw Zoe into the family as Corey’s babysitter. The ups and downs of this sometimes awkward foursome fill the remaining pages of the novel.

The action in A Theory of Small Earthquakes unfolds against the backdrop of the colorful reality of Berkeley, beginning in the 1970s and lasting until the near-present. Meredith’s descriptions of life in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco are pitch-perfect, and when she retells the story of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, I felt the ground shaking underneath me all over again.

So, though I hardly qualify as a lesbian, or even as a person of the female gender, I found A Theory of Small Earthquakes to be delightful, unsettling, suspenseful, challenging, and very well written. In other words, a damn good read.

A review of The Silent Oligarch, by Chris Morgan Jones

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

If you imagine today’s Russia to be in the grips of gun-toting mafiyas bound by their own Slavic brand of omerta and competing with Mexican drug cartels to rack up impressive body counts, you’ll be set straight by this thoroughly credible tale of high-level skullduggery based in Moscow and played out in London, Berlin, and the Riviera. In The Silent Oligarch, Chris Morgan Jones’ debut in the world of present-day espionage, you’ll encounter a sophisticated version of intrigue much more reminiscent of John Le Carre than Robert Ludlum.

This finely crafted novel revolves around an obscure Russian bureaucrat named Konstantin Malin, a lifer in the Ministry of Oil and Industry who controls a large share of his country’s oil and gas industry, the world’s largest. His front man is an English expat lawyer in Moscow, Richard Lack, whose Russian wife and child have left him for the less morally ambiguous clime of London. Lack is at the helm of a vast and almost impenetrably complex global network of shadowy enterprises, the sole purpose of which appears to be to launder enormous quantities of Malin’s money and funnel it back to Russia for investment.

Lack’s cozy life in Moscow begins coming apart when a Greek oilman, one of the many wealthy businessmen Malin has cheated, decides to unmask Malin’s fraud and put him out of business. Enter Ben Webster, a former journalist posted to Russia now employed at a significantly higher salary by a private, London-based intelligence agency. As Webster sets out to unravel the real story behind Lack’s role as “owner” of an enormous global energy conglomerate, Lack himself is forced to testify in court in several countries as a result of the Greek tycoon’s lawsuit. The truth begins leaking out, and even the FBI becomes interested in the case.

Tension builds as both Lack and Webster are tormented by their seeming helplessness in the face of the unfolding events, and the suspense never lets up despite minimal violence. The jarring conclusion will surprise all but the most insightful of readers.

This is a book written for readers, not for Hollywood. It’s told in the third person, with chapters alternating between Lack’s and Webster’s perspectives. With scenes set largely in such colorful places — the Kremlin, the Riviera, and luxurious hotels in Berlin and London — a talented screenwriter might manage to fit this twisted tale into the confines of a filmscript, but the interior dialogue that forms the heart of this novel would very likely be lost.

A review of Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

The third book in a trilogy, Agent 6 concludes the story of Leo Demidov, a hero in the Great Patriotic War (as the USSR termed World War II) and later an agent in Stalin’s secret police. By way of introduction, the book opens in 1950 with Leo in thrall to the Sovet State, a senior officer in the MGB (predecessor to the KGB and to today’s FSB) charged with training newly recruited agents. Jesse Austin, a world-famous African-American singer closely resembling Paul Robeson, is visiting Moscow, where he will perform and publicly extol the accomplishments of the Soviet regime as he sees them. Leo is detailed to help ensure that Austin is shielded from the realities of life in Moscow. In the course of this challenging assignment, Leo comes into close contact with Raisa, a beautiful and brilliant young teacher with whom he has been infatuated from afar.

The scene shifts abruptly to 1965, with Leo and Raisa married and living in poverty with their two adopted daughters (minor characters earlier in the trilogy). Raisa has persuaded Leo to leave the secret police. Meanwhile, she has risen far in the Ministry of Education and has been named to head a peace delegation to the USA — a student group in which she insists including her daughters. With great misgiving, Leo agrees not to stand in the way of their leaving for New York.

There, in New York, still in 1965, a tragic series of events involving Raisa, her younger daughter, Elena, Jesse Austin, and a senior FBI agent named Jim Yates swiftly unfold. Leo is unhinged by the tragedy and devotes his life to unraveling the mystery behind it.

Again the scene shifts. It’s 1973, and Leo has just failed again in his frantic attempts to leave the Soviet Union and make his way to New York to investigate the mystery. Seven years later, in 1980, we find him in Kabul, where he had been given a dangerous assignment as punishment for attempting to flee the Soviet Union. He is now the longest-surviving Soviet “advisor” to Afghanistan’s Communist Party, training the new Communist regime’s secret police. Here, in the shadow of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ferocious resistance by the mujahedeen, Leo becomes embroiled in a series of violent and troubling experiences that eventually make it possible for him to travel to New York at last.

In the concluding scenes of this extraordinarily compelling novel, we find Leo in New York, scrambling to unlock the mystery that has bedeviled him for a decade and a half.

Agent 6 is the conclusion of Tom Rob Smith’s Leo Demidov trilogy, which began three years ago with Child 44, his debut novel. Child 44 was an instant success, both critically and commercially, and won numerous awards both as a thriller and as a work of literature. It was followed in 2009 by The Secret Speech. All three books are brilliant, and all can be read without reference to the others.

Tom Rob Smith is a young, Cambridge-educated British writer, son of a Swedish mother and an English father. It’s difficult to understand how he could have acquired such a fine sensibility about life in Stalinist Russia, let alone in Afghanistan under Soviet occupation. Smith was born in the year the USSR invaded Afghanistan, a quarter-century after Stalin’s death. Yet Agent 6 rings true throughout.

A review of The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Daniel Yergin

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Some two centuries ago a profound economic shift upset the traditional relations of East and West. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe and the United States began to overtake the great civilizations of China and India, the planet’s wealthiest and most sophisticated societies throughout most of recorded history.

Now those two centuries of increasing imbalance are coming to an end, the result of the combined effects of five centuries of globalization beginning with Columbus; advances in transportation and communication in the 19th and 20th Centuries; the rapid spread of literacy, especially in the years following World War II; and major improvements in healthcare, which dramatically extended life expectancy across the globe. As the 21st Century continues to unfold, we may yet see today’s wealthiest economies — those of Europe and the United States — fall behind the Asian giants, as they tap the potential of billions of increasingly healthy, well-educated citizens.

This tectonic shift in geopolitical relations lends great urgency to energy politics today. The rise of the East is as great a factor in the sourcing and distribution of energy resources as climate change. Both factors loom large in economic researcher Daniel Yergin’s superb new book, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World.

In 1991 Yergin published The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, which gained the #1 spot on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, won the Pulitzer Prize, and established his firm, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, as the country’s most sought-after voice on energy issues. Two decades later, The Quest broadens and updates the earlier book, relating the monumental changes in energy markets wrought by technological innovation, historic geopolitical shifts, and our changing views of energy and climate.

“Three fundamental questions shape this narrative,” Yergin writes in the introduction. “Will enough energy be available to meet the needs of a growing world, and at what cost, and with what technologies? How can the security of the energy system on which the world depends be protected? What will be the impact of environmental concerns, including climate change, on the future of energy — and how will energy development affect the environment?”

Approaching the topic more specifically, he asks, “Will resources be adequate not only to fuel today’s $65 trillion global economy but also to fuel what might be a $130 trillion economy in just two decades? To put it simply, will the oil resources be sufficient to go from a world of almost a billion automobiles to a world of more than two billion cars?” Later the author emphasizes the significance of this question: “Despite growth in emerging markets, one out of every nine barrels of oil used in the world every day is burned as motor fuel on American roads.”

The Quest is a big book, gushing with information. Yergin surveys virtually every significant aspect of energy in today’s world.  He touches on every energy source, every significant energy-related technological development of recent decades, and every major location of energy resources, and he briefly relates the history of each element. For a nonspecialist, The Quest is an immersion course in the nature and politics of energy. It’s fascinating.

Ever the dispassionate analyst, Yergin treats highly controversial issues with a simple, fact-based approach. However, despite its ill treatment by much of the oil industry, he takes on the issue of global climate change in detail and with dead seriousness, leaving little doubt that the more rational leaders in the energy sector have no question about the potential world-changing effects of rising global temperatures.

But Daniel Yergin is no pessimist. Tackling the issue of “peak oil,” for example, he says, “the world is clearly not running out of oil. Far from it. The estimates for the world’s total stock of oil keep growing.”

Go HERE — http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ – to lodge your protest.

A review of Tribe, by James Bruno

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Harry Brennan is a veteran CIA field agent, equally skilled in recruiting informants and in front-line combat, but he has little respect for his superiors in the agency and poor insight into the finer points of the high-stakes office politics that threatens to sideline him. Following a botched mission to Afghanistan, he comes to believe that someone in the agency tried to have him killed in the field to conceal a plot to shift U.S. foreign policy to the benefit of Big Oil. The stakes in this latter-day version of the Great Game couldn’t be higher: $25 trillion in oil reserves, a brokered peace between the Taliban and the Afghan government, and the election of a President — not to mention Harry’s life and the life of his college-age daughter.

Tribe might have been an outstanding book. The backdrop shifts from Afghanistan, where espionage, major power rivalries, and the outsized ambitions of commerce so often converge, to the Georgetown cocktail circuit, the White House, and the CIA. Harry Brennan is a satisfyingly complex figure. Descriptions of life and work in the CIA, the White House, and on the front line in Afghanistan ring with credibility. The story itself is powerful and almost plausible. And James Bruno’s writing style is evocative.

Unfortunately, Bruno hasn’t produced the book that could have been crafted by a more experienced writer steeped in the principles of narrative technique. Time contracts and expands with no apparent logic: a span of minutes may occupy pages, while the passage of weeks or months is dispensed with in a phrase. Scenes shift without warning, in the absence of even the most rudimentary transitions.

James Bruno is a former diplomat, military intelligence analyst, and journalist who clearly possesses a wide range of knowledge about the themes touched on in Tribe. However, this is his third novel. Here’s hoping he’ll study narrative techniques before he writes the fourth.