Tag Archives: James Brydon

Four (More?) Years!

22 Monday Oct 2018

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This week, Novelhistorian turns four, which means I’ve reviewed more than two hundred books. As many of you know, each year I write a post in which I mention, in thumbnail, those that have made the deepest impression on me–or, to put it another way, those I expect I’ll still remember after another fifty-odd books have passed through my hands. This year, I’ve chosen eleven, as follows:

Nicole Lundrigan conveys the hatreds, will to vengeance, and oppression that mark Tito’s postwar Yugoslavia in The Widow Tree, told through the eyes of three teenagers. Her tense, moving narrative shows that for war’s survivors, trust is the first casualty.

The Infidel Stain follows the two amateur detectives M. J. Carter introduced in Strangler Vine, this time in 1840s England, as they unravel the mysteries behind murders committed in a politically charged atmosphere. Carter’s prose and characterizations are first-rate, and she re-creates the upheaval of the Hungry Forties with breathtaking vividness.

Paris Spring, James Naughtie’s excellent thriller about the Paris student uprising of 1968, echoes John Le Carré in its elegant plot with few moving parts, focus on motive, and characters who believe in what they’re doing. It may resolve too neatly, but Naughtie knows his ground, especially the brethren of spydom.

Eleanor Catton tells a Victorian-style epic mystery in The Luminaries, about gold-rush greed, deception, and loyalty in 1860s New Zealand. Where many authors struggle to intersect two disparate lives without resorting to contrivance, Catton seamlessly weaves more than a dozen threads. Skip the astrological charts she includes and dive in.

In The Fifth Servant, Kenneth Wishnia renders a remarkably imaginative mystery, set in sixteenth-century Prague. The Christian community claims that a girl has been murdered so that the Jews can use her blood to make Passover matzo–the old blood-libel myth–and a rabbinical student attempts to solve the case by using his knowledge of the Talmud.

With Mrs. Osmond, John Banville pens the unthinkable, a sequel to Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, down to the loop-the-loop sentences that invariably arrive at truth and the intense feelings rendered in a gesture, a glance. But it’s far more than imitation James, which you need not have read to appreciate this novel; Banville underlines the heroine’s masochism, which, he argues, amounts to vanity, an unusual, striking perception.

There are grittier mysteries out there than The Inheritance, but Charles Finch’s warm-blooded Victorian detective, Lenox, is an exceptionally clever sleuth, and the understanding of human nature and the kindness and generosity that suffuse the writing make this novel stand out. Not only will you be entertained, you’ll learn tidbits of information that Finch likes to throw in–for instance, why the British drive on the left.

It’s not kindness or generosity that mark The Moment Before Drowning, James Brydon’s tale that blends colonial war in 1950s Algeria with a grisly murder in Brittany, but it’s a terrific story, and I guarantee it will grip you and make you think. Brydon juxtaposes the two narratives to ask what purposes the law and its enforcement actually serve. Be warned about the torture scenes, but nothing is gratuitous or sensational.

The Wanderers, Tim Pears’s gorgeous, subtle novel, tells a heart-breaking story about two teenagers’ suffering and longing, set in Devon around 1912. She’s the daughter of the manor; he’s the servant’s son exiled from the estate. Pears leaves questions hanging, which will bother some readers, but his prose and characterizations are flawless, and the tension never lags in this simplest of plots.

Another novel I admire for elegant simplicity is The Anchoress, Robyn Cadwallader’s superb tale about Sarah, an English girl in 1255 who chooses to be a religious hermit at age seventeen. Why she does so, and how her choice changes many lives, not just her own, makes a remarkably complex story, so beautifully and truthfully rendered that you have to remind yourself it’s a first novel.

Last on my list, but only because I reviewed it most recently, is The Mercy Seat, Elizabeth H. Winthrop’s elegiac tale about Louisiana justice in 1943. Nine voices recount the hours before the scheduled execution of Willie Jones, an African-American teenager convicted of rape, and how the verdict has fractured the town. Winthrop manages to recount this heart-rending, provocative story in brief, staccato chapters that form an eloquently coherent whole, pure sorcery that will haunt you.

Those are my eleven favorites. I’ve enjoyed writing my reviews this year and hope you’ve liked reading them.

Colonial Thinking: The Moment Before Drowning

13 Monday Aug 2018

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Review: The Moment Before Drowning, by James Brydon
Akashic, 2018. 224 pp. $26

When Captain Jacques le Garrec returns to his native Brittany in December 1959, his arrival creates a stir, as a former Resistance hero and police detective, a local boy who made good. But the wrong kind of notoriety trails him too, because he’s been brought back to France to face accusations regarding his interrogations of suspected terrorists in the colonial war in Algeria. In the days preceding his legal hearing, a local lycée teacher has asked him to investigate the death and mutilation of a brilliant girl, a student of his. This is a distraction for le Garrec, to be sure, but that’s what he needs.

It’s a small town, where everybody knows everything about everyone else, or thinks they do, so it’s somewhat surprising that the police haven’t solved the crime. However, they haven’t tried hard, a mystery in itself. Another puzzle is why le Garrec has returned in apparent disgrace. Did he torture one too many civilians, and is that really considered a crime by the French forces pursuing this increasingly savage, unwinnable war? Or is his crime something different?

Brydon handles both narratives with skill and an elegant simplicity I admire. The whodunit part, the standard, expected tale, remains tense to the end, though the number of suspects is small, and the evidence is in plain sight. But the greater pleasure of this fine debut novel derives from the parallel narratives of the torture cells in Algeria and the murder investigation, a terrific juxtaposition that asks what purpose law and its enforcement actually serve. And that’s why le Garrec’s in trouble, because he dared pose that question in Algeria.

Consequently, the conflict occurs in le Garrec’s head, as his memories of Algeria deny him sleep, and in his investigation. Not only does the dead Breton girl recall a young woman he interrogated (the event prompting the charges against him); the police inspector, a brutal bigot, reminds him of his superior in Algeria. Lafourgue, the inspector, is a well-drawn character, and as a petty ego inflated with barely repressed rage and unsatisfied desire, he makes a good foil for le Garrec. The contempt that Lafourgue expresses for the murder victim shocks le Garrec and perhaps explains why the inspector has felt no particular urgency to find the killer. But Brydon’s accomplishing much more than thematic development here. He’s linked his protagonist’s inner and outer journeys, a winning combination every time, if done right.

And Brydon does a lot right, starting with the vivid prose:

As I walk from the bus stop along familiar, deserted streets the sky seems enormous, bloated, and infinite, billowing over everything. I lose myself in swirls of gray; great, bulbous streaks of darkness; every possible permutation of impending rain. After two years in Algeria I feel the Breton damp seeping into my body, chilling me, and the ice carried on the wind settling in my blood. Out by the sea, which I can perceive only as a howl frustrated by the rocks, the beam of the lighthouse flashes its warning into the encroaching dark: a fragile blade of light that swings away and is lost, only to return each time and abide in the blindness of the night.

Where he goes wrong, I think, is to rush. Sometimes, the characters don’t speak so much as they expound, which sounds canned, intended to reveal essential information or a person’s trait in a single passage. I notice this especially in the beginning and whenever le Garrec interviews witnesses for the first time. What’s the hurry? Engage the reader emotionally, and you can write at Tolstoyan length. What creates tension isn’t information about le Garrec but who and what he loves, his feelings about himself and his situation, his struggle to redeem himself. Brydon conveys that, of course; if he didn’t, his novel could be half the size it is, yet not work. It seems like a lack of trust (or poor editorial advice) that has led him to sprint through emotional changes as if the words were on fire, which then requires him to move on to what comes next to put it out. But those are actually the moments in which the reader wants to insert him- or herself into the narrative and ask what he or she would do under the same circumstances. End that connection abruptly, and the novelist breaks the mood, yanking the reader out of the narrative.

Nevertheless, I think that The Moment Before Drowning is well worth reading (with the caveat that there are many scenes of torture, so be warned). I look forward to seeing what the author can do once he gains more confidence in his readers and, perhaps, himself.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, where this post first appeared in shorter, different form.