I found it in Alan Furst. About a year ago, I discovered his work and bought several novels. He has several mysterious and appealing novels. I even recently picked up on in audio CD.

For my first foray, I read The Polish Correspondent. The titular character is Alexander de Milja, an aristocrat who becomes an excellent spy as he traverses Europe in the wake of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. First, he oversees the smuggling of Polish gold reserves aboard a nondescript passenger train, which de Milja himself selected. The journey culminates in a shoot out with bandits and a mad dash to Romania. But, tellingly, the heroes are as much the Polish commoners aboard the train as they are de Milja. This appears to be a Furst theme.

De Milja later settles in Paris — often the centerpiece of Furst’s tales, I gather — to conduct espionage for the Poles and the English. The likable officer quickly becomes exceptional as a spy and handler. So good, in fact, he out survives his own operatives, like the memorable teenage radio operator whose demise from chomping down on a cyanide capsule matches the bomb with which she kills her SS nemesis. The scene is a wonderful, understated bit of black humor that Furst excels at.

De Milja also has love affairs — alluring, middle-aged European women who keep Alexander at a distance emotionally so that the inevitable partings ache, but only a little.

Finally, the Polish officer is assigned to the Eastern front, a veritable hell on earth. It’s a mission he enters knowing he won’t survive. But, then, de Milja learns to master life as a partisan, too. He completes his futile mission in rescuing a Pole, who later dies. Finally, it’s time for a desperate and cold escape with a Jewish woman whom he saves. Here, de Milja shows again his likable qualities as he sacrifices much to save her (and himself).

De Milja’s a wonderful protagonist — likable, smart, properly cynical when he must be. He’s a very Euro-styled James Bond in a much harsher milieu. But the minor characters surrounding him are just as likable and richly written.

If the novel suffers at all, it’s from its episodic structure. It works nearly as a collection of novellas rather than a novel structure. The train escape, taken alone, is a fine short work. The drama of the final book builds to a climactic prison escape, but then flattens out as de Milja and the Jewish woman flee. As such, the novel survives as a reflection on the troubling nature of war and espionage. While there are exciting scenes, the book is not a thriller. Furst takes his time in parts. In others, he’s wry and sometimes implies the dirty work of war and spying, making the reader understand the remains of violence in a confectioners shop, for one example. 

Furst’s writing is rich and detailed, but not overwrought. He captures rich, European details — early war Paris comes alive in his prose. He has a legion of delightful and tragic minor characters, themselves also rich and quintessentially European. All is contained within a novel with a subtler structure than the usual spy thriller. The end result is superb, but will not deliver a quick fix or adrenaline rush.

The Polish Officer: A

The narrator is one of the Midnight’s Children, a child born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the day of India’s independence. These thousand babes grow to earn supernatural powers. The narrator can read thoughts, which accounts for much of his storytelling, and he assembles the thousand children into a kind of telepathic congress. He’s not alone — his “twin” has supernatural knees. Yes, knees, between which he can crush and kill.

The twin is actually a family friend, but there’s a critical twist. An English nursemaid switches the two boys at birth, and the narrator himself is born a bastard of a renegade Englishman and his servant Indian mother. But, because of the switch, he’s raised instead in a wealthy family of unusual characters. Meanwhile, the other boy grows in the poor family and becomes a violent killer then war hero, all hinted at a distance through the narrator’s tales.

That narrator is an untrustworthy fellow. He is — or claims to be — the catalyst of so many of the affairs and deaths and dramas surrounding him. The narrator often refuses to admit his responsibility, or to downplay his involvement. The effects are often tragic.

What his story crafts amid the web of magical realism and shady retelling is a strange and sometimes beautiful menagerie of tales that stab at the heart of India in the modern world. It’s not a subject I know much about, but Rushdie brings alive India of the 1950s and 1960s in personal detail, from the toothpaste brands to the wars in Kashmir. Mumbai in particular percolates with color and colorful characters.

It’s a challenging book, dense in its sometimes feverish prose and thick with layers of filtered tales. The book trails off into oblivion as modern India — and it’s pickled curries — grow beyond the reach of the narrator’s arms. He falls apart, literally, and the reader realizes there’s one thing he didn’t lie about: “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”

Midnight’s Children: A-

In an echo of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales, Chabon casts two very different sword-swinging wise-crackers. Both are Jews from disparate backgrounds. Amram is a hulking African who wields a Varangian axe and a command of languages far and wide (he’s served the emperor of Byzantium). His counterpart is Zelikman, a lanky Frank physician with a gloomly disposition. Both are wildly clever and ably skilled. Chabon makes both endearing, but Zelikman usually steals the scenes with his obnoxious hat and anti-hero antics.

Chabon writes one hell of an adventure tale. Each chapter is a fun twist and a healthy dose of cliff-hanging. The tale is almost effortless in its tidyness, yet somehow manages not to be predictable. After swindling some townsfolk, the pair get caught up escorting a prince who is not everything he appears to be, and yet is more. By the end of the  tale, they’ve jaunted about the foothills of the Caucasus, allied themselves with elephants against Rus invaders, fought — and then recruited — Muslim knights, and ushered in a coup.

The banter is fun, the action exciting, and Chabon sneaks beneath it all some commentary on Jewishness (and Islam) quite relevant to today. His prose in the book is baroque and obscure, deliberately so. It’s a nod, I think, to the idiosyncracies of many admirable pulp adventure writers. It’s at once a joke and tribute, and it also manages to keep the text’s voice lively and smart. It works.

Wonderfully, the book includes a brief afterword cum apologia by Chabon explaining his forays into the lands of adventure writing. He more famously treads in, as he calls it, late-century naturalism a la Wonder Boys. He also explains his only slightly tongue-in-cheek working title for the book, “Jews with Swords.” The afterword is well worth a read for anyone on either side of that absurd divide between serious fiction and everything else.

Gentlemen of the Road: A-

The Club Dumas is a mystery thriller with shades of the noir detective. In this case, protagonist Lucas Corso is a book detective. He’s a mercenary hired by rich — and usually corrupt — book collectors to buy, sell, trade and find rare books. I found Corso fascinating. (My wife, who read the book with me, found him deplorable. Ce la guerre!) He’s a weasel of a man, exceptionally clever, and lonely. He occupies his time drinking gin and romanticizing his Napoleonic ancestor. Oh yes, and books — very expensive, very rare books.

The story begins with a book collector’s suspicious suicide. Corso gets hired to verify the dead man’s possession – a rare manuscript written by Alexandre Dumas. It’s a chapter from The Three Musketeers. Subsequently, he’s hired by an obsessive collector of the occult to discover which of three extant editions of The Book of Nine Doors is a forgery.

Thus begins a twin strand of narrative where Corso races to find eccentric book collectors and examine their occult tomes while he’s pursued by a modern-day Milady and Rochefort (Dumas’ famous villains) as a strange conspiracy re-enacts The Three Musketeers with him at the center. The eccentrics wind up dead, and Corso demonstrates his cleverness.

Along the way he finds the girl. The alluring woman gives Corso fictional names and careless excuses. She’s slightly infuriating to read. Corso asks her questions I wanted to know, and she’s just aloof. There are many hints that she’s supernatural – a guardian angel maybe, or even the Devil. Through her shining, green-eyed seduction we learn that Corso once loved and lost. It explains his emptiness and callousness. And, in the end, explains why the green-eyed girl is so fond of him. She is, it turns out, rather diabolical.

Throughout the book, Corso works to unravel the pictorial mystery within The Book of Nine Doors. The book contains nine engravings, and the novel actually shows the images. This teases out one of the most captivating mysteries of the book. I desperately wanted Corso to unravel this occult puzzle. And, he does. But, the result is disappointing.

Pérez-Reverte gives us a lesson in narrative; I’m still not sure I needed it. At times, the characters actually imagine that their absurd situations are so dreadful that perhaps they’re merely fictional characters in a book. Of course, they are. The author’s teasinge. This itself, I don’t mind. He’s not the first to dabble in post-modernism. But, Pérez-Reverte has another, grander trick up his sleeve. To spoil it for readers, his trick is a lesson in how we perceive narrative. Those twin strands of narrative are ruses. They’re not intertwined. Corso – and therefore readers like me – have impressed upon these twin strands interconnectivity.

And what is the result? Corso, for all his cleverness, learns that he’s lost his soul long ago. He’s Faustian. And, in the end, he knows it. He’s smitten with the girl, and she’s pulling the strings behind it all, wrecking selfish interests for her own amusement. Let’s just say the devils in the details.

Like I said, I’m not sure I needed the lesson in constructing narrative. Fortunately, I the lesson entertained the hell out of me. It had all the wonderful trappings of that Umberto Eco style occult mystery (Eco himself actually has a cameo in the story!) in a tidy detective fiction package. It’s a good read with some frayed ends.

The Club Dumas: B-

His memoirs on writing amused me. They might even have inspired. It’s not much of a book to review (Oh hell, ok: B+). But, it is full of great lines. Here are some of the best:

When you’re six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.

If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all. I’m not editorializingm, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remidn yoruself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

You go on the third level, of course, and begin to write real fiction. Why shouldn’t you? Why should you fear? Carpenters don’t build monsters, after all; they build houses, stores and banks. They build some of wood a plank at a time and some of brick a brick at a time. You will build a paragraph at a time, constructing these of your vocabulary and your knowledge of grammar and basic style. As long as you stay level-on-the-level and shave even every door, you can build whatever you like — whole mansions, if you have the energy.

But you need the room, you need the door, and you need the determination to shut the door. You need a concrete goal, as well.

I also tore through Private Wars, the next novel in the Tara Chace series.

Here, Tara Chace is out of the service with a baby. This is serious business given the thriller ending of the previous book. Meanwhile, Paul Crocker, her chain-smoking, hard ass boss deals with bureaucratic hell. His own boss is out to get him, and Tara’s replacement sends an operation into chaos. These first several chapters make for the most interesting reading in this more uneven book. In particular, Crocker’s at his most compelling here as Crocker plays politics and juggles his own home life some. He tends to be the best character in the series.

The rest of the thriller is set in Uzbekistan, where a dying dictator’s daughter and son squabble over who will assume control of the country. The daughter is a Machiavellian nymphomaniac whose lover is a secret police sadist. Turns out, this guy’s the real villain. So, the story pits Chace against him as she tries to smuggle the brother out of the country and maybe figure out where some rocket launchers are along the way.

The story is about Tara’s comeback to special operations and Paul Crocker’s desperation to avoid a lousy demotion. Again, Rucka is willing to do awful things to his protagonist. The effect is a build-up to Tara’s torture and near rape at the hands of the secret police antagonist. It’s tense, but it’s a no-brainer figure out Rucka won’t go that far. No rape is imminent, and her rescue is minutes away.

This willingness to torture Tara (figuratively and literally) is what makes Rucka’s writing so great. Here, it almost works as well as the previous novel. But, not quite. The plot becomes to uneven, particuarly at the fast-forward moment following Tara’s rescue. Rucka actually interrupts the narrative chapters with a psychological profile about Chace, who has post-traumatic stress disorder (who wouldn’t!) and a bloody obvious need for revenge. While a bit of interesting verisimilitude, the suspense suffers.

Of course, Tara enacts her revenge, and regains her hard edge as Britain’s finest “Minder” (Rucka’s slang for special agent). Best of all, she sneaks in one surprise decision at the close of the story that turns out to be the clearest sign that Tara Chace really is back, motherhood and all.

Private Wars: B-

The very brief review intrigued me.  I actually managed to remember the name of the book. It took me several weeks, but I tracked down Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition volume 1 at my local comic store. I was hooked.

I found volume 2 later on, and read it with the same enthusiasm. Tense writing, tought issues, modern relevance, and a complicated woman hero that was more interesting to read about than just the lady James Bond I first figured her to be. I still await volume 3. But, in the mean time, I caught on that author Greg Rucka penned two Queen & Country novels as well. I chewed through that 1,000 or so pages faster than any reading I’ve done in a while.

A Gentleman’s Game is the first novel, which squeezes in somewhere between other mission “arcs” in the comic book volumes. It’s easily the best Tara Chace story I’ve read (I later caught on that Rucka is more novelist than graphic novelist; fortunately he’s no slouch either way). It’s a story revolving around Tara Chace’s need to feel useful, perhaps seek some revenge on Islamic fundamentalist terrorists active in the UK and beyond. And, it also has Chace chasing after a genuine love interest in her former colleague.

Rucka does an admirable job shifting perspective among Chace, her hard ass boss Paul Crocker, and an English born Muslim terrorist antagonist. Rucka’s not shy about putting his protagonists in ugly territory, trusting that the reader will stick around. similarly, his work at making a messy character in the terrorist both utterly disgusting and fascinating. He manages to make a fanatic — and the terrorist truly is that — interesting. We get the inside voice on the terrorist’s resolve, but we’re not foolish enough to buy his madness and see it for the manipulative evil that he performs.

The book’s a thriller, and fills that role well. While I saw the dramatic ending coming in those final chapters, the pacing and excitement throughout makes for a great read with enough carefully considered real-world relevance to avoid the escapism route.

A Gentleman’s Game: A

Up next, Private Wars, the second Tara Chace novel, and a bit more about the woman character.

A couple weeks ago I found No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy for sale at Half Price Books. I’d eyed it since picking up Blood Meridien and, later, The Road, which is on my reading list posted previously.

Let’s just get this out of the way. Cormac McCarthy is a sunnuvabitch of a writer. This book is not for the faint hearted. My wife would probably throw it across the room and yell at me for making her read this despressing as hell mess.

I loved it.

It’s a book that teases your sympathies. It begins with Llewellyn Moss, a Texas veteran of Vietnam who lives in a trailer and spends his time hunting. He finds a drug deal gone wrong in the desert countryside. Dead drug dealers abound, as do dangerous firearms, heroin, and a bundle of millions of dollars. Moss takes the money and runs, knowing full well he just kicked off a bloodbath, and he’s likely to see some of his own blood spilled. He does, and much worse.

McCarthy paints scenery with a kind of language that his southern Texas denizens would appreciate. How he captures such vivid beauty and horror with what at first blush looks like broken grammar and colloquial ignorance is a mystery. His prose is Faulkner-esque. It captures the music of a people that his own narrator describes as “common as dirt.”

In the works I’ve seen from McCarthy, this is his trademark. He writes this sparse prose devoid of much punctuation. Few apostrophes. No quotation marks, so the dialogue blends in with the prose. Hell, he writes sentences that would get his old grammar school teacher to break out the brass ruler on his knuckles. No verbs. A sentence, at once barren and colorful. (Take that, grammar school teacher!)

He also does a trick of shifting perspectives. He begins a new perspective with a pronoun, often “he.” The effect is that we’re piecing together this mess of a moving crime scene story, and I think it makes the reader pay more attention, to sit up and consider not only who’s doing what, but especially how they compare to one another.

At times, my tired eyes had to re-read a sentence, perk up my mind’s ears and hear the colloquial phrase. But, it’s all there. Every mean as hell piece.

At its core, this is a story with a painful resolution. For me, at least, the story wasn’t about what I presumed. I waited for something, some kind of justice to the awful killing spree of Anton Chigurh, the hitman after Moss.

It never comes. Which means that whatever I thought I was paying attention to was misguided. McCarthy sucker punched me with Moss. He had me hooked the moment Moss was stupid and decent enough to go back out to the dying drug dealer with a jug of water. And, same for that girl he got killed. Cocksure and all, I still love Llewellyn Moss.

But it’s the sheriff. That’s were the story is, it turns out. And, the story is a kind of apocalypse for the Western. It’s the sheriff’s last round, and he knows he’s done. He is. I feel sorry for that old boy, as they’d say in Texas.

He’s no Llewellyn Moss, but I can’t say I blame him. Neither am I.

No Country for Old Men: A

Author Neal Stephenson is verbose, and devilishly clever. He hops from character to character, and zeroes in on intricate details that swirl into essays of bizarre events and amusingly distorted views of everything from insects to submarines to Captain Crunch. The bit on how protagonist Randy, a modern day hacker and descendant of near-autistic code breaker Lawrence Waterhouse, eats Cap’n Crunch in the Philipines is usually the sort of thing that would drive me nuts, wasting space on Randy’s minutiae-ridden life. But, Stephenson pulls it off. I found it endearing. Indeed, in Randy’s case in particular, the minutiae is crucial to realizing how absurd and, well, safe his life is. It contrasts highly with Bobby Shaftoe, a morphine addicted WWII jarhead who’s all action and not much thought. He literally goes out in a blaze of glory (pun intended — his beloved is Glory, Philipine goddess and grandmother of Randy’s girlfriend in the modern day).

And this tells us a lot about both eras. It is not a simple-minded condemnation of the modern era losers to ther bygone heroic era, either. Through his characters, Stephenson reveals the complex and abstract difficulties of the modern day, and the mortal and brutally simple difficulties of the war.

The books is, at its core, an ode to nerds. Randy and friends are fantasy role-playing hackers who get mixed up in baroque Philipine politics as they try to establish a virtual data center and create their own currency. They barely know what they’ve gotten themselves into.

And neither do I. That’s the main flaw in the book. Randy’s never really in danger. He’s paranoid, and bad things happen to him. But, the structure of the book is basically flat. It ends mostly as it begins and as it continues. It remains amusing, even engrossing, throught out, particuarly the WWII era characters Lawrence, Bobby and Japanese soldier and engineer Goto Dengo, whose survivial tale against god awful tropical disease, straffing, sharks, cannibals, and building his own tomb is epic.

Stephenson sprinkles in some brilliantly fun explanations of cryptography. In one chapter, he includes real-life genius Alan Turing on a bike ride with Lawrence. He explains the famous Enigma code with a wonderful bike chain metaphor. Other chapters have equations, Unix code, line graphs (for ejaculations!) and other amusing diagrams in a kind of hyper-nerd nod to Vonnegut.

Despite its too-even build, the big novel was hugely entertaining. I kept turning those hundreds of pages, and become fond of Randy, in no small part because I identified with his white guy nerdiness.

I got used to the warmth, actually. Seven days in the Carribbean will do that, extreme sunburn or not! We spent St. Patty’s day drinking with the Irish, and days after slurping down enough rum to make us forget the sunscreen. Somehow, along the way, I managed to shed enough stress to actually look forward to coming back.

Back home now, things are mostly the same. Still no movement on any moving, which is to say that our real estate saga continues.

Canada gets all the good stuff! She’s just wrapping up her master’s degree; next weekend is her final class. And, just yesterday she received the work transfer she requested to return teaching at the city’s academy high school. She’s thrilled, and I’m proud.

For years, I’ve been so busily distracted on a number of personal projects that I’ve neglected reading. But, I’m happy to say I’ve been reading a lot lately. I read Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons (A-), which is a wonderfully troubling book, despite appearances to the contrary. I also read John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (C+), which was a quick and dirty read, and that about sums up it’s quality, too. Entertaining, but not terribly so.

I’ve got a stack of ten books, and my goal is to read all of them before year’s end. Given my slow pace, that may be quite a feat! I snuck in the Scalzi book as well as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. But, otherwise, the books are:

• Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier (Read! A-)
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (Read! B+)
• The Road by Cormac MacCarthy (Read: A-)
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (Read! A-)
• White Noise by Don Delillo (Read! C+)
• The Wizard by Gene Wolfe
• Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides
• Snow by Orhan Pamuk
• Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
• Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

I’ve also got The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester sitting around somewhere. The rest of my (many) books are packed away for a move that never happened. I can always unpack them and come up with several more lists of ten!

Edited to add November 13, 2007:
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (Read! A)

Edited to add September 5, 2008:
A Gentleman’s Game by Greg Rucka (Read! A)
Private Wars by Greg Rucka (Read! B-)
Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Read! B+, No blog review)
The Alchemist by Paul Coelho (Read! D)
White Noise by Don Delillo (Read! C+)

Edited to add October 14, 2008:
On Writing by Stephen King (Read! B+, No blog review)
The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Read! B-)