The Janissary Tree

Jason Goodwin's debut novel with the 19th-century investigator Yashim Togalu won the coveted Edgar Award for Best Novel. I've had it on my shelf for a while, but wanted to read it after I was assigned Goodwin's latest novel to review for the March issue of the new Washington Independent Review of Books.

I'll keep this blog short and save more about Goodwin and his background for the review. The Janissary Tree is a very literate, textured novel, rich in detail about the exotic Ottoman court, the Sublime Porte, without letting any of it overwhelm a lean mystery. Goodwin's main gimmick is to make Yashim a eunuch and to successfully overcome a certain natural squeamishness about this subject. It enables Yashim to enter the titillating world of the harem, to consult with the sultan in the Seraglio itself, and to move easily in a demi-monde of ambivalent sexuality, while keeping him an outcast and a loner.

The plot in this debut turns on the possibility of a resurgence of the Janissaries, the elite palace guard that was brutally suppressed 10 years before the time of this novel in 1836. The plot is developed with panache and some suitably gory murders. Intimations of a three-dimensional Yashim also emerge in this debut, presumably to be amplified in subsequent novels, so that his castration is something more than a gimmick to get your attention.

Istanbul -- Goodwin usually refers to it by this name because he is writing from a Turkish point of view though it was known as Constantinople in Europe until Ataturk officially changed the name in the 1920s -- is a marvelous setting for any novel, and Goodwin knows how to use it to great advantage. It is a quick, rewarding read, and I look forward to the sequels.

Servants of the Map

Andrea Barrett's stories about passion and desire, longing and frustration are stirring at times, almost unbearably poignant at others, and always compelling. They are about people driven by curiosity, the need to discover and understand nature. They are scientists, mostly, trained or amateur, or, in "The Cure", healers and caregivers.

The title story is the most austere, told in part in the letters of Max Vigne to his wife, Clara. He cannot own up to her his fascination for the pursuit of plant life above the tree line in the mountains he is surveying, his willingness to forgo the comforts of hearth and home, his rejection, in effect, of her and their children. He is clearly an emotionally stunted man but possessed of his own incipient passion, which he is able to finally recognize in the isolation of the Himalayas.

The next stories are each enchanting in their own way. "The Forest" tells of an encounter between an aging Polish scientist and a young, failed science student, who nonetheless bond through their love of the forest. Both characters wrestle with the expectations put upon them -- the one an accomplished scientist ignored by a hostess too wrapped up in her own little world, the other a young woman who chooses not to follow her sister's path. A quiet drink (of bison-grass vodka!), an interlude in the woods amidst the deer with the old man extracting what pleasure he can from this glancing acquaintance with a young woman who sees him as -- an old man.

The heart of the book comes, though, in the two related stories, "Theories of the Rain," and "Two Rivers." They are the stories of two siblings separated at a young age (two and five) but who retain an abiding attachment to each other. Lavinia, who describes herself at one point as nothing but appetite, is consumed by passionate longings that remain unfulfilled, even as she chooses the rational path of a suitable marriage. Even more telling is the story of her brother, Caleb, who loses the love of his life, but gets a second chance at marriage and devotion to a cause -- educating the deaf -- that gives him a fulfilling life.

It is in the novella-length "Two Rivers" that Barrett demonstrates the full range of her virtuosity as a writer, shifting points of view, creating characters in a few sketches who possess an astonishing range of emotion, giving us in these characters -- Samuel, Caleb, Stuart, Miriam, Grace, and the absent Lavinia -- a generational saga, all in 50 pages.

"The Mysteries of Ubiquitin" tells the story of a young girl whose infatuation with her parents' entomologist friend leads to a career in biochemistry and ultimately, if improbably, a romantic interlude with this older man when she is a young woman. The Polish scientist may have been better off keeping his romance in the realm of fantasy. This story, more explicitly than the others, suggests that the passion driving scientists is a profoundly erotic one.

"The Cure" is an ambitious tale, the longest in the book, that reunites Max Vigne's wife and daughters with characters that, apparently, appear in Barrett's earlier novels, Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal. While Barrett is fond of these connections, it was for me in this story not particularly enlightening, since I haven't read these other books. It was almost disappointing, in fact, to learn the after-story of Max Vigne's decision to pursue a career as a botanist. The depiction of the Adirondacks and the ravages of tuberculosis, with all its echoes of The Magic Mountain, made for an entertaining story nonetheless.

I ordered this book because of my research into MacArthur grant authors and because I like maps. I'm curious now to see whether Barrett can maintain this wonderful balance between her elegant prose and her probing of the nature of passion through an entire novel. Watch this space.

The Stone Gods

While this recent book by Jeanette Winterson made for compelling reading and there were flashes of feeling that stirred me, it left me puzzled in the end. The depictions of dying worlds made you feel the barrenness of physical existence, but in the end I think Winterson failed to master the genre well enough to make this work as a novel.

It reminded me strongly of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas -- so strongly that I felt obliged to look up the dates to see that Mitchell's 2004 book did indeed precede Winterson's 2007 novel. The wrapping of parallel stories through time, with the future worlds so strikingly similar in tone and sentiment, makes me wonder how much influence the Mitchell book had on Winterson, if any.

Winterson's style is simpler, more direct, less flashy and more lucid than Mitchell's, but Mitchell's work was somehow more coherent, with more of a punch. The interplanetary love affair between Billie and Spike in the end seemed too episodic to be moving in any way.

I have a good friend who swears by Jeanette Winterson, so I probably have not done her justice by starting with this later work, which I found on the remainder shelf at Politics & Prose. I have some of her earlier books, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Passion, on my shelf and will read those before coming to any judgment. Perhaps they will give me a new appreciation for this book.

The Lazarus Project

I feel ambivalent about this book by Aleksandar Hemon. The writing is dazzling, it is chockablock with insights, it is a compelling, layered novel -- and yet curiously unmoving.

The narrator, Vladimir Brik, who shares many biographical details with Hemon, is troubled, flawed, and ultimately, I think, not very sympathetic. While the wit and perception carry the reader along, Brik's ambivalence and what seems to be lack of character makes him someone it's hard to care for.

This may well be Hemon's intention. Brik, caught between cultures and a perennial victim like the historical Lazarus Averbruch that he wants to write about, suffers from being in this situation. He is precisely not the hero his American wife, Mary, might expect. He is rather the somewhat unsatisfying character you encounter in Bosnia or Moldova or Ukraine.

"I recalled Mary, her strained, half-assed Catholic innocence, her belief that people were evil due to errors in their upbringing and a shortage of love in their lives. She just could not comprehend evil, the way I could not comprehend the way the washing machine worked or the reason the universe expanded into infinity. For her, the prime mover of every action was a good intention, and evil occurred only if the good intention was inadvertently betrayed or forgotten. Humans could not be essentially evil, because they were always infused by God's infinite goodness and love. We had conducted long, unerotic discussions about all this."

That deadly American innocence, as R.W.B. Lewis wrote about in The American Adam and Herman Melville portrayed so well in Benito Cereno. The innocence that remained ignorant of evil -- the kind of evil Chicago authorities showed toward immigrants Lazarus and Olga Averbruch, no different than the vicious anti-Semitism that chased them out of their homeland.

Brik contrasts storytelling in Bosnia -- where listeners voluntarily suspended disbelief to enjoy a good story, expecting it to be embellished or fabricated -- with that in America. "It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth -- reality is the fastest American commodity."

Obviously, Brik's relationship with his neurosurgeon wife is not in good shape and seems to have come completely unraveled by the end of the novel -- though it's hard to tell because Mary is more of a cipher than a person. Olga Averbruch, whose point of view is the primary one in the parallel narrative of the events in 1910 Chicago, and even her brother, the dead Lazarus, are more alive than Mary.

There are, as one blurb promises, traces of Ragtime and Everything Is Illuminated, but both narratives in this novel skim the surface and are not as satisfying as the total immersion of the two earlier works. The real focus is Brik's problem in finding a cultural identity, one that will enable him to fulfill the same yearning that Lazarus and Olga had, of finding happiness and peace after being uprooted.

Brik resists Mary's desire for him to become more acceptable by becoming more American. She accepts his foreignness as long as he is willing to grow out of it. So Brik seeks refuge in his alter ego Rora, the enigmatic Bosnian photographer who accompanies him on his "research" trip back to Europe. That trip slowly slips into a fantasy-land. It is impossible for the reader to consider Rora's fate as real, or, if it is supposed to be real, to care. But if we adopt the Bosnian attitude toward storytelling, it doesn't matter.

We will never know what really happened to Lazarus. It is a mystery without a solution and still tantalizing when the book ends. But we get a glimpse into a little-known episode in American history, when hysteria about "anarchism" and hyper-prejudice about Emma Goldman and other radicals suppressed civil rights in a way uncomfortably similar to today's anti-Islam hysteria. It would be helpful to know more about this period and hopefully Jamie Morris will be able to translate his project for a Goldman biography into reality.

Hemon is another recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, like Yiyun Li. This book is more cerebral than The Vagrants and for that reason less satisfying, but stimulating and worthwhile nonetheless.

The Redbreast

Jo Nesbo tries and largely succeeds in blurring the lines between crime fiction and literary fiction. There is murder and police and something like a procedural in The Redbreast, but this Norwegian writer is plumbing the depths of individual psyche and also political consciousness.

Most good crime fiction tries to do this, but some succeeds more than others. In a posting last year on Nordic crime fiction, I reported that I had gotten bogged down in Redbreast because the hero, Harry Hole, disappeared from the early pages as the author developed a back story set in 1944 on the Eastern Front.

So I started over in a more receptive frame of mind and let the back story play at its own rhythm. It is of course vital for understanding the action set in contemporary Oslo. It is something of a challenge to an English reader because the unusual Norwegian names, while not as bad as Russian, are difficult to hold onto. It is further complicated by the fact that characters have similar names, names similar to their birthplaces, nicknames, identity switches and, one begins to suspect, multiple personality disorders.

Nesbo lays out his plot in a leisurely but well-paced manner. Harry remains largely sympathetic, though he does rub you the wrong way sometimes. There are more murders, including a nasty philanderer who messed with the wrong woman at the wrong time and one victim whose murder is still left partly unsolved at the end of the novel -- a thread to be continued no doubt in the next installment in the series.

These Nordic crime novels do convey the curious charm of Scandinavia, these northern countries that are a fascinating blend of European culture and frontier ruggedness. Can spring feel so good without the rigors of a dark, cold winter? Oslo and Norway, more so than Stockholm and Sweden, carry those echoes of Vikings and Atlantic harshness.

Like Stieg Larsson in his Dragon Tattoo series set in Sweden, Nesbo is fascinated by Norway's Nazi past and neo-Nazi present. Dark undercurrents of fascism run through Norwegian society then, during the war, and now. Even Americans who know what Quisling means are probably unaware that he was a Norwegian official who headed the collaborationist government during the Nazi occupation of Norway. The Norwegian resistance, in Nesbo's portrayal, was a feeble movement that gained mythic proportions only after the Nazi defeat.

All of this creates a rich environment of conspiracy and political betrayal that lends impetus to the narrative in Redbreast. A full cast of well-drawn characters, not one but two love stories, a villain who is evil but still arouses a touch of sympathy, some nail-biting suspense, murder and gore -- it's all here in a well-written and well-translated 521-page package.

Having sampled and enjoyed detective stories from in Sweden, Norway and Iceland, I suppose I should look for some Danish and Finnish detectives. I'm betting publishers have looked for and found equally talented authors in these countries to produce crime fiction that by now, given how trendy Nordic is, has found its way into English. Watch this space.

The Vagrants

I ordered this book the day I read that Yiyun Li had won a McArthur Foundation genius grant and found myself immersed in a mind-bending trip back to the Cultural Revolution in China in the late 1970s.

Given the place of China in the world today, it is an amazing glimpse into a corrupt and regimented world, a 1984 for the Asian brand of totalitarian rule. It depicts the deracination of culture where people are firmly rooted in tradition and even superstition. The only people truly at home in this world are the rootless vagrants, Old Hua and his wife, who return to their wandering ways after the unfortunate events in Muddy River narrated in the novel.

It is an ensemble cast of characters, though the main narrative thread is the relationship between Nini, a young handicapped woman, and Bashi, a dangerously amoral outsider. It is framed by the executions of two idealistic young women who automatically become counterrevolutionaries when they become disillusioned with Mao's revolution.

These are small characters in a small provincial town and yet they embody the epic sweep of the Cultural Revolution, a hypocritical leap forward that marked the end of any socialist pretenses in China. It shows simple people who have been deprived of their moral compass through the oppression of the Communist regime -- whether the cynical depravity of Old Kwen, entrusted to bury the executed Shan Gu, or the innocent treachery of Tong, a six-year-old whose biggest concern is the disappearance of his dog Ear.

Shan Gu, a model revolutionary during her teens, has her execution for counterrevolutionary activities brought forward so that her kidneys can be harvested for a well-connected official in the provincial capital. It would be hard to find a more horrifying metaphor for the exploitation of a helpless populace by a corrupt regime. Shan Gu's subsequent further posthumous mutilation before her burial completes the picture of moral bankruptcy.

By an odd coincidence, The Vagrants is the second book in a row for me featuring a deformed and crippled young woman in a prominent role. Like Mikkelina in Arnaldur Indridason's Silence of the Grave, Nini lacks the looks and charms of a nubile young woman, but that does not stop her womanly yearnings. But if women in general are helpless and vulnerable in the two societies portrayed in these novels, this is especially true of a crippled woman. In both cases, they are the survivors, however, and a testimony to human resiliency. The portayal of Nini's modest longings is almost unbearably poignant at times and makes her in some ways the true heroine of this story.

Yiyun Li's other published work is a collection of short stories, and the interweaving strands in this novel owe much to her skill in depicting these small self-contained narratives. We come to know Teacher Gu and his wife, Tong and his drunken father and long-suffering mother, the odd Bashi and the sympathetic Nini, the news announcer Kai and her husband Han and platonic lover Jialin. The trajectory set in motion by the execution of Shan Gu is clear in advance and yet told with exquisite care. The naive and foolish hopes of the young and the vain efforts of the mature to remain indifferent all become enmeshed in an oppressive and stifling environment without honor or justice.

Oddly enough, the least visible characters in the novel are the vagrants of the title, the Huas. The childless couple moved around restlessly, taking care of unwanted infant girls, until they settled for a time in Muddy River. It turns out to be a brief respite before they feel compelled to resume their vagrant life.

The novel depicts a life of simplicity and extreme poverty that nonetheless has its own dignity to the extent it can escape the ravages of regime. A hungry Nini scrapes the flour paste off of posters for nourishment and Teacher Gu squirrels away a precious Parker pen for decades.

It is a heartbreaking work and so relevant for our times. Material conditions have improved in China but the fundamental injustice, and presumably corruption, of the system remain intact. The recognition for Li's fiction, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize for imprisoned activist Liu Xiaobo keep us from forgetting that fact.

Silence of the Grave

Channel surfing one evening I came upon the Icelandic film Jar City and was intrigued by the stark landscape and Nordic chill of what I learned was a film based on a novel by Arnaldur Indridason. This book continues the series.

As is the case with Wallander and other Nordic detectives, Indridason's Inspector Erlendur is a flawed, unhappy man who has a knack for solving crimes. The environment is bleak and intense, and in Iceland, there is a frontier element missing in the more prosperous Sweden, Denmark and Norway. It helped to have seen that landscape in Jar City -- hard to imagine how the American remake that is in production can match the Icelandic original.

What makes Silence of the Grave compelling as a novel, however, is not just atmosphere, but the deep-running psychology of a 60-year-old incident -- I hesitate to say crime -- that Erlendur tracks down when a skeleton is discovered on the outskirts of Reykjavik during construction of a new housing development. The portrayal of a wife-beating brute and the effect of his abuse on his family is intense and hard-hitting. The suspense is maintained by the painfully slow unearthing of the skeleton by an archeological team. After all, what hurry is there getting to the bottom of a death that clearly occurred decades ago.

I have the feeling it is not a great translation, but it's hard to know if a certain stylistic clumsiness is in the original or is due to the translator. The characters and atmosphere, the boldness of the plotting, more than compensate in any case, so the book is decidedly gritty.

The parallel development of Erlendur's character, his relationship with his daughter, the troubling secrets of his own past add another layer of psychological texture that makes the book very satisfying to read. Indridason takes a page out of Henning Mankell's book to make Erlendur's assistants mildly interesting in their own rights.

So Iceland is well represented in the new wave of Nordic crime writers. The harsh environment of these countries touching the Arctic Circle is anything but cozy, and strips society and the characters of the novel down to the essentials. It helps that the writers are not without talent and that we are now getting access to them in serviceable translations.