Review: 'An Unmarked Grave'

AN UNMARKED GRAVE: A Bess Crawford Mystery
By Charles Todd
Historical mystery
June 2012
William Morrow

ISBN: 978-0-06-201572-3                                                                                    

Intrepid Bess Crawford is just behind the trenches in wartorn France, tending to the wounded, when the Spanish Influenza strikes in the spring of 1918. In the mdist of the chaos, an orderly notices something wrong with one of the many bodies. He didn't die of war wounds or the flu. His neck was broken.

The orderly informs Bess as someone he trusts. She promises to alert the proper people. She promises not only because she trusts the kindly older man who is the orderly and sees for herself that the dead man was murdered, but also because the victim was a family friend who served in her father's regiment.

But before she can get anywhere, the flu strikes her as well. In the near-fairytale atmosphere in which Bess Crawford exists, she is spirited out of France and convalesces back home as strings are pulled. For Bess Crawford has connections, most importantly her father, the Colonel Sahib.

This imposing figure and dearest family friend Simon are full-fledged confidants as she pieces together bits of information and visits various figures connected to the victim. These figures are representative of various strata in Britain's WWI class system, and as such provide a fascinating picture of people carrying on while the Great War goes on and on and on. Although Bess initially isn't quite believed, it's soon evident that the orderly, who died soon after she was taken ill, showed her something important.

Before long, more people connected with the investigation die. Bess knows the killer will target her, but her sense of duty demands that she continue. And if that means she has to take along with her a brash American officer recovering from his war wounds, that's what she will do. Even if he and Simon don't exactly take to each other. The killer gets closer and closer to Bess and her inner circle before the end, which is a classic case of the sleuth figuring it all out in the nick of time.

The world for Bess that the Todds have created is a genuine homage to the World War I era. The violence is off-screen, the characters do not directly express their feelings for each other (really, how thick are Bess and Simon to not have figured that out?) and duty reigns supreme, the plot unfolds in true tricky Agatha Christie style. The series also has other aspects of the historical era it depicts. There is no irony or nod to modern sensibility in Bess calling her father the Colonel Sahib. Women and lower class folk are expected to know their place. In one of the poignant stories told during the unveiling of the plot, a widower father who has lost several sons to the war doesn't understand why the widow of one of them won't come work the farm. Her son would grow up in fresh air but the workload would obviously kill her.

Downton Abbey fans would be well served by reading the Bess Crawford novels while waiting for a new season. Fans of Inspector Rutledge, the first series character brought to life by the Todds, will find a lighter version of the tone in that post-war series.

©2012 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Star Trek FAQ'

STAR TREK FAQ: Everything Left to Know About the First Voyages of the Starship EnterpriseBy Mark Clark
Nonfiction
June 2012
Applause Theatre & Cinema Books
ISBN: 978-1-55783-792-9                                                                                          

A long time ago in our galaxy, not one far away, network television found itself hoodwinked when writer/producer Gene Roddenberry promised NBC "Wagon Train to the stars" and instead delivered the beginning of a new part of our culture, Star Trek.

For those who grew up on TOS (The Original Series), whether as teens waiting for 10 p.m. on Friday nights that final season or the syndication every weekday that endlessly recycled the original 79 episodes, Star Trek had it all and promised it all. We didn't kill ourselves during the Cold War. We ended Vietnam. We became an integrated society. We fulfilled President Kennedy's promise of space exploration. We could dream of becoming astronauts and our dreams could come true. We didn't have to be the popular kids to find a place to fit in, as David Gerrold eloquently explains in his foreward to a new compilation of behind-the-scene facts, background material and episode highlights, Star Trek FAQ.

Clark's compendium has many strengths, whether the reader is a first-generation Trekker or wondering what that big 2009 movie was based on. Clark provides a concise, highly readable, rundown of the original influences and executives in various companies who contributed to what became Trek. Although Trek was Roddenberry's baby, he had to run the gauntlet of studio and network approval to get that baby on the air.

The ins and outs not only show how difficult it is for any show to get on the air with any vestige of its original intent intact, it also chronicles how the Trek universe was refined and designed to become what ultimately became beloved. For example, the FAQ has excellent point-by-point notations of the contrasts between the original pilot -- "The Cage" -- and the final program that aired. Spock originally was meant to be more curious than logical. Jeffrey Hunter's Pike is closer to Roddenberry's version of Horatio Hornblower than that swashbuckler James Tiberius Kirk ended up being.

The episode guide is not "full service" because, as Clark notes, "there are plenty of those available elsewhere". However, all are included with thumbnail plot sketches and notes about other aspects such as broadcast history, guests and even such details as changes in scores and opening credits.

Worthwhile ideas to consider abound. In noting how Trek differed because it posits that mankind has survived and improved, there is a quick roundup of SF antecedents. It's about as cheery as The Hunger Games and other current examples of the popular YA genre of dystopian fiction. The chapter itself admirably brings together the examples of how mankind shows its better nature by rejecting killing and slavery through the run of TOS. Another Trek theme of a better civilization with cool gadgets that is still run by the people who made the gadgets, and not the gadgets themselves, is detailed in a thoughtful manner.

Review: 'Grave Mercy'

GRAVE MERCY                                                                  
By Robin LaFevers
YA fiction
April 2012
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 978-0-62834-9

Ismae escapes the prototypical fate worse than death – an arranged marriage to a brute – when he sees her scars that mark her as a daughter of Death in medieval Brittany. She is sent via an underground railroad of priests and herbwitches that still worship the old gods to a convent, where she is trained in the arts of the poisoner, the assassin and the courtesan to serve Mortrain, or Death.

After some minor successes, circumstances force the abbess to send her to court to serve the teenage duchess by keeping an eye on the royal bastard brother. Duval is neck-deep in intrigue that surrounds the orphaned duchess and as many attempts to marry her off as Elizabeth I juggled two hundred years later.

The questions of trusting him as an ally and potential lover fit well within the plot, which balances historical fiction with the palace intrigue and battle maneuvers (not shown but discussed), romance with the attraction Ismae and Duval feel for each other, and high fantasy as Ismae comes into her heritage as the daughter of Death.

What follows may be seen as spoilers by some:

Unreliable, naive narrators and The Sense of an Ending

The narrator of a novel usually, although not always, also is the protagonist. It's the ultimate "it's all about me" kind of storytelling, epitomized by David Copperfield in the novel by Charles Dickens. "Chapter 1: I am born."

Some narrators are trustworthy. Their world is seen only through their eyes, but they can be trusted to tell all they know and not to skew the facts in order to fool you. And then there are the narrators who either have fooled themselves so well you can't trust them or who are so arch they cannot be trusted. These unreliable narrators are at the core of some of the finest storytelling we've known, from Chaucer to Wilkie Collins to Stevens in Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.                                                                                      

Just as rewarding for the reader who likes to be involved in discerning who or what to believe is the naive narrator, such as Huck Finn. He accepts slavery as a normal part of his world and recognizes that, in his world, he will go to hell for helping Jim. And decides he can live with having transgressed. His acceptance is not the same as deciding that his world is wrong. Naive narrators are not reliable either, but it's because they don't know the ramifications of everything that's going on. Stevens is this kind of narrator for most of The Remains of the Day. His single moment of near-realization is devastating in the novel, and he backs away from self-knowledge quickly to return to self-delusion.

Sometimes deciding whether the narrator can be trusted takes up a good deal of the reader's attention. This was me when reading Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, which won the Man Booker Prize last year.

Tony Webster is in his late middle age, divorced yet still on good terms with his ex-wife, the steady Margaret, distant yet polite with his daughter, the preoccupied Susie. His story begins with odds and ends of his time at school and university with his mates and first serious girlfriend, Veronica. Adrian, a newcomer at school, becomes part of his circle. A schoolmate commits suicide after his girlfriend becomes pregnant. At university, Veronica appears to be a tease but Tony says he doesn't mind. He meets her family one weekend and no one appears impressed. His friends meet her and, again, no one appears impressed. After Tony and Veronica break up, he gets a letter from Adrian that he and Veronica are now in a relationship. Tony's life goes on. But Adrian later kills himself.

Review; 'When Captain Flint was Still a Good Man'

WHEN CAPTAIN FLINT WAS STILL A GOOD MAN
By Nick Dybek
Literary Fiction
Riverhead Books
April 2012
ISBN: 978-1594488092                                                                                                      

The loss of innocence is a common theme of fiction. It's not unusual for a young man or woman, or even a middle-aged one, to look back on the year that things changed. The year they grew up. For young Cal, it is the winter he discovers what it may have been like for the good captain in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island when he decided to become a pirate. And because of what he learns and what happens, he leaves Loyalty Island in Nick Dybek's novel of innocence lost, believing he can never return home because he will never regain his innocence.

Cal grows up the son of a crab fisherman, the captain of one of the ships owned by John Gaunt. Captain Henry Bollings and the other captains, including one named Brooks (Gaunt, Bolingbrooke, hmmm...) can provide for their families because of Gaunt's good stewardship of the fleet. Everyone and everything on Washington state's Loyalty Island owe their livelihoods to Gaunt. The captains are good, hard-working men whose children adore them and whose wives suffer while they are gone to the Bering Sea (just like those guys on The Deadliest Catch). Cal idolizes his father, who spends one off-season telling him bedtime stories of the good Captain Flint, before things went wrong and set up the action in Treasure Island. To Cal, his father is as honorable and brave and true ad Captain Flint. The next year, his father asks Cal if he knew the stories were just that, stories.

It's a timely question. John Gaunt dies suddenly. His wastrel son, Richard, comes back to town to fidget about what he should do with his unwanted legacy. Ultimately, he makes a public announcement that he plans to sell the fleet. Everyone will be out of a job. The town will die. Then, for the first time in Richard's life, the captains announce he has agreed to go crabbing with them. Not two days into the season, the word comes back that he has fallen overboard.

Review: 'Arcadia'

ARCADIA

By Lauren Groff                                                                                                        
Literary Fiction
March 2012
Hyperion
ISBN: 978-1-4013-4087-2

The story is vague at first, the how and why opaque as the amoeba grows, as the characters take shape and as the outline of what's going on takes its own time to form.

It begins before the protagonist is even born. Little Bit is the first child born to a group on caravan that eventually becomes a commune. He knows the memory took place before his birth -- a group of women, including his mother, washing clothes in a cold river, people singing old folk songs, a bonfire and a small caravan on the move toward their eventual home.

Before the skeptical reader gives up, know that Bit knows he knows the story because it has been told to him so many times that it feels as real to him as something he actually did experience. So is Bit's own story. He is, after all, "the first Arcadian ever" and his story "is another story so retold that everyone owns it".

This communal passing on of a story is the key to Arcadia, the latest novel by Lauren Groff. So is the sense that, while the novel takes place from the 1960s to the next decade, it is timeless, a tale the Grimm Brothers may have heard to pass along: "The forest is dark and deep and pushes so heavily on Bit that he must run away from the gnarled trunks, from the groans of the wind in the branches." The forest and the outdoors are as much Bit's world as the commune.

Review: 'The Orphan Master's Son'

THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON                                                               
By Adam Johnson
Literary Fiction
January 2012
Random House
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9279-3


At first, Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son appears to be a straight-forward story set in a nation surrounded in secrecy and deception, North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the son of a man who operates a camp where orphans are dumped until either adopted to work at hard labor or who perform ad hoc hard labor. His mother, a wonderful singer, was taken years ago. Jun Do names all the orphans after war heroes, saving for himself the name of a warrior who proved he could be trusted by killing himself.

During the long famine, the orphans die off, his father runs off and Jun Do ends up in the tunnels, trained to kill in the dark. He next surfaces in the hold of a rusting fishing vessel, monitoring radio transmissions by night and trying to fit in with the crew. He's deemed a hero, sent to Texas, sent to prison and tortured, sent to impersonate a former hero of the nation now in disfavor, and tortured. His life is not his own.

The novel throws some strange twists at the reader and tries more than one way to convey narrative. After Jun Do is sent to prison, a second narrator, a nameless interrogator who tries to get the truth from him, carries part of the story. He cares for his blind parents, who are afraid to say anything that would not be approved by the ruling elite. This interrogator, who tortures people, is as powerless as anyone though, getting swept up in involuntary rice harvesting because he's out on the street and not on a bus. Part of the story is told as the annual Best North Korea story broadcast daily. Part of it backtracks to what happened when Jun Do disappeared and became commander Ga, military hero and husband of beloved actress Sun Moon.

The Orphan Master's Son is ultimately about the ways that, when leaders deceive us, we not only go along with it in order to survive, we find new ways to fool ourselves. The actress Sun Moon sees starving families scavenging through tree branches, trying to find chestnuts to eat even though they are as illegal as poaching the king's deer was in Olde England. She says they are acrobats performing for her.