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Blood Will Have Blood: The Abstainer

22 Monday Mar 2021

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Review: The Abstainer, by Ian McGuire
Random House, 2020. 307 pp. $27

When the law hangs three members of the Fenian Brotherhood for killing a policeman in Manchester, England, in 1867, Constable James O’Connor knows the punishment will solve nothing. The Irish revolutionaries will retaliate, and since he’s the copper who has paid informants among them and understands his countrymen better than his English superiors, officialdom should listen. But they don’t. O’Connor’s place of birth condemns him in their eyes; they consider the Irish bloodthirsty, drunken savages, thieves, and heathens. Besides, O’Connor left the Dublin police under circumstances he won’t talk about, but which have something to do with drink.

Now, however, he abstains, and though his sympathetic, more human approach to law enforcement alternately puzzles and enrages his bosses, he speaks the sober truth no one wants to hear. But he does get them to pay attention when he learns that the New York Fenians have sent an assassin to Manchester to plot revenge for the hangings. Unfortunately, it will take more than O’Connor’s say-so to persuade his superiors to follow through in the ways he suggests, partly because they can’t believe that the drastic legal penalties they have just meted out will fail to curb the violence.

O’Connor has an inkling of what he’s up against, but not even he can anticipate the determination of his newest enemy. Stephen Doyle, though born in Ireland, fought for the Union in the Civil War, and he believes that he’s been sent to Manchester to fight another war whose rules are much the same. A colder, more ruthless and capable opponent would be hard to find, and he startles even his Fenian brethren in Manchester by his attitude. You know that he will give no quarter and expect none.

You also know that sooner or later, O’Connor and Doyle will meet, because the constable does his best to think along with the assassin. However, O’Connor has two distinct disadvantages. He can’t command, merely suggest, whereas Doyle dictates what he wants, and the Fenian foot soldiers obey. Secondly, and more important, O’Connor has a heart, and it’s still reeling from the untimely death of his beloved wife in Dublin. Further, a nephew he barely knows shows up from America and demands to play a role in the surveillance operation — a brilliant stroke of McGuire’s that raises the stakes immediately.

Consequently, this thriller has much more to it than the usual cat and mouse. You do want to know whether O’Connor and the police will thwart Doyle or fail to stop him, though it would be fairer to say that the narrative gives you no choice, compelling you to turn the pages. McGuire’s a terrific storyteller, and “no — and furthermore” lives in the very soot-infested air of Manchester. For me, the tension even feels too much, at times.

“Freedom to Ireland,” an 1866 Currier & Ives lithograph. The Fenian Brotherhood began in the United States and was eventually superseded by similar organizations (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the U.S.)

On top of that, The Abstainer explores an aspect of good versus evil that belongs to every conflict in which some believe that violence is the best or only solution, while others don’t. Naturally, that division fits Irish history under British rule, so though this story takes place in 1867, the same issues would apply in 1967 or beyond. Accordingly, McGuire’s really asking who has the upper hand: the side with fewer scruples or the one claiming the moral high ground? And is the upper hand the better hand to have, or not?

As befits this heady theme, McGuire deploys lucid, hard-edged prose that conveys deep feeling and the raw atmosphere. Early on in the novel, O’Connor witnesses the hanging — he’d rather not, but he’s supposed to be there — and it makes a terrible impression on him:

O’Connor hears the call of a crow like a dry cork being pulled from a bottle and, from over the river, a clatter of cartwheels and the whinny of a horse. For a long moment, the three men stand side by side beneath the heavy oak crossbeam, separate but conjoined, like rough-hewn caryatids, and then with a startling suddenness they are gone. Instead of their breathing, living bodies, there are only the three taught lines of rope like long vertical scratches on the prison wall. The crowd inhales, then gives a long guttural sigh like a wave slowly pulling back from a beach. O’Connor shudders, swallows, feels a pulse of nausea sweep up from his stomach into his mouth.

With this moment and many others, throughout The Abstainer, you see how thin the line between life and death, good fortune and bad. One false move here, and catastrophe would have resulted; one forgetful lapse there, and it arrives unexpectedly. That’s another theme, what happiness depends on, and how fleeting it can be.

If this story sounds bleak, in many ways, it is. But it’s also quite powerful and rings true; this is a novel to remember, and I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, an online retailer that splits its proceeds with independent bookstores.

Rusalka: The Huntress

15 Monday Jul 2019

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Review: The Huntress, by Kate Quinn
Morrow, 2019. 531 pp. $27

In spring 1946, memories of the war are just beginning to fade — for some. Seventeen-year-old Jordan McBride, who lives with her widowed father in Boston, meets his new fiancée, an Austrian widow. Jordan welcomes her future stepmother and half-sister Ruth and takes them into her heart, luxuriating in the warmth and support she receives in return. Even better, Jordan’s stepmother encourages her to dream of higher education, something Dad doesn’t think a girl needs.

Four years later, in 1950, former British war correspondent Ian Graham; his assistant and translator, Tony Rodomovsky, an American; and Nina Markova, a former pilot with the Red Air Force, join forces in Vienna to track down Nazi war criminals. The Nuremberg Trials have focused on the big fish, but thousands of minnows have swum to safety, whether in various corners of Europe or the New World. They may be former assassins, concentration-camp guards, or petty functionaries who oiled the machinery of murder and appropriation, and Ian and Tony want them all, though they know that’s impossible.

Rare color photo of defendants at Nuremberg, taken by Raymond D’Addario, November 1945 (courtesy U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Nina, however, wants one in particular, a woman nicknamed die Jägerin (The Huntress), with whom she has a score to settle. So does Ian; and in one of the strange but clever twists in this thriller, Nina and Ian are married, though they’ve met only once, five years before for a couple days, and haven’t seen each other since.

Confused? Read The Huntress, and you won’t be. Quinn’s a fine storyteller, and she does an excellent job of stitching together many disparate pieces to make a coherent, exciting whole. The pages turn quickly, nothing happens too easily (except for a happy coincidence or two toward the end), and the stakes are plenty high enough. The reader knows long before the main characters who die Jägerin is, and where, but Quinn strings the inevitable confrontation out beautifully.

Of all the essential elements, I like the plot of The Huntress best. I do salute Quinn for calling attention to the problems of tracking down war criminals after Nuremberg, a forgotten cause. And I also like her attempt to explore the means one is permitted to use to see justice done. Ian rejects violence; Tony wouldn’t mind slapping around a witness or three; and Nina always carries a knife.

She’s the most interesting, fullest character by far. She’s done her best to amputate her heart, yet she comes across in part because she’s the only one with a developed past. Born by the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia, she styles herself a rusalka, a water witch, the type who drags down the unsuspecting victim. That lake figures heavily in her psyche:

The lake was frozen in a sheet of dark green glass, so clear you could see the bottom far below. When the surface ice warmed during the day, crevasses would open, crackling and booming as if the lake’s rusalki were fighting a war in the depths. Close to shore, hummocks of turquoise-colored ice heaved up over each other in blocks taller than Nina, shoved onto the bank by the winter wind.… Nina stood in her shabby winter coat, hands thrust into her pockets, wondering if she would still be here to see the lake freeze next year. She was sixteen years old; all her sisters had left home before they reached that age, mostly with swelling bellies.

Nina’s half-savage, knows it, and likes scaring her friends. But scaring her enemies feels even better, for in a life lived without sweetness, revenge is the only substitute.

The other characters don’t grab me particularly. Jordan, though she represents feminism in wanting a photojournalism career, lacks angles or corners and seems too all-American. Tony’s too good to be true, a composition of charm, chutzpah, and linguistic wizardry. (The narrative rather dubiously depends on the relative ease with which certain characters pick up, say, fluent German or Russian in a matter of months.) Ian feels like a compendium of elements rather than a complete person, and though his heart’s in the right place, I don’t entirely believe him.

But the story’s the thing, here, and aside from the occasional detail that makes me raise an eyebrow (having mostly to do with photography or firearms), Quinn has researched her ground thoroughly. I note a few present-day idioms that someone should have flagged, and too many bizarre verbs replace said, often followed by unnecessary explanations of what the character means by what she says. But The Huntress is a top-notch thriller with an unusual premise, and I think it’s worth your time.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

House of Atreus, Revisited: House of Names

12 Monday Jun 2017

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Review: House of Names,by Colm Tóibín
Scribner, 2017. 275 pp. $26

Agamemnon, waiting with his army for a fair wind for Troy, sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the gods. That act sets in motion a blood-will-have-blood intrigue that throws Mycenae’s House of Atreus into turmoil and evokes moral issues that inspired all three tragic dramatists of ancient Athens: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Iphigenia in Tauris, as a priestess of Artemis, sets out to greet her brother, Orestes, and his friend, Pylades; fresco from Pompeii, 1st century C.E. (Naples National Archeological Museum, courtesy May Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia Commons)

Here, Tóibín has departed from the script in an always riveting but occasionally portentous narrative, and the result is a mixed success. As befits its sources, House of Names offers plenty of deep themes, and these intense, jittery Mycenaean royalty have enough ambitions, fears, and rough edges to give those themes superb scope. The story, though familiar, feels fresh, partly through reinterpretation, but largely because Tóibín knows how to evoke corners and wrinkles of character that add tension. Even though you know what happens next, you have room to hope that it won’t go that way, and he subtly encourages this delusion until it’s too late.

The novel opens with Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s queen, narrating how her husband lures her and their daughter, Iphigenia, to his camp on the pretext that the girl was to marry Achilles. I like this section very much. Not only does Tóibín craft the warrior king into a weakling, a vacuous coward who can’t even bring the news himself, an unspeakable father to a daughter who adores him, the women attempt to resist and are crushed as if they were insects. The feminist message comes through loud and clear, but there’s more.

Clytemnestra, whom literature has long stereotyped as a bloodthirsty fiend who knows nothing beyond her treasonous lusts and desire for revenge–a misogynistic portrait, if ever there was one–receives a measure of rehabilitation in House of Names. It’s not just that Tóibín plumbs how deeply her daughter’s sacrifice shakes her emotionally. It’s that the brutality pushes her to declare, privately, that if the gods in fact demanded Iphigenia’s death–which Clytemnestra doubts–that only proves their irrelevance.

I know as no one else knows that the gods are distant, they have other concerns. They care about human desires and antics in the same way that I care about the leaves of a tree. I know the leaves are there, they wither and grow again and wither, as people come and live and then are replaced by others like them. There is nothing I can do to help them or prevent their withering. I do not deal with their desires.

But this being the House of Atreus, Clytemnestra doesn’t stop at philosophy. She swears revenge and spends the years of her husband’s absence planning how to carry it out. When Agamemnon finally comes home from Troy, Clytemnestra murders him and gives out that a rebel faction within the palace was responsible. To accomplish this, she has enlisted Aegisthus, a powerful, unscrupulous man who has own scores to settle, and, she finds, no desire to share power or anything else except her bed–and others’. Clytemnestra has miscalculated by a long shot.

And that too is a theme–how, when killing starts, it doesn’t stop. Electra, her younger daughter, swears revenge in turn, and from her narrative sections, you see that she too wants power. Whereas Clytemnestra loved Iphigenia and, once, her husband, Electra doesn’t seem to love anybody. But she hates her mother, to the point that she blames her for Iphigenia’s death. Clytemnestra has done serious wrongs, but Electra’s approach tells you that two wrongs don’t make a right.

Amid all them is Orestes, Clyemnestra’s son, who grows up an exile and yearns to return home. Again, unlike the classic treatment, this Orestes isn’t a natural leader, an outraged son who demands his birthright. In fact, he’s a born follower and wants to do right, whatever that might be. He has only two desires–to find love and not to be shunted aside. His is the saddest, most poignant perspective in the novel, a balance to the mayhem in which he must participate.

Having loved Nora Webster–and held up its prose as a model for my own writing–I’m startled to say that Tóibín’s style in House of Names fails to measure up. The language seems excessively formal, and therefore often distant; for instance, the author never uses contractions and often adds needless prepositional phrases that make people sound pompous. Sometimes, they speak as if they knew a scribe were in the room, taking dictation for posterity. The rhythm, too, becomes annoyingly noticeable in places, as with the short, choppy sentences in Clytemnestra’s voice.

But my biggest complaint, one that surprises me, is the sheer number of “he felt, she felt.” Tóibín didn’t do that in Nora Webster, a novel remarkable for its artistry in conveying inner life through subtext and by inference, with nary a cliché. Compare that with an example here, “He veered between feeling brave and feeling nervous,” and you see the difference.

As a novel of ideas and a retelling of a powerful story, House of Names is worth reading. But it’s disappointing, nevertheless.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

An Existential Warrior: Sword of Honor

23 Monday Nov 2015

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Review: Sword of Honor, by David Kirk
Doubleday, 2015. 441 pp. $27

Musashi Miyamoto, the young protagonist of this absorbing, far-ranging novel (and a real seventeenth-century figure), walks away after the battle of Sekigahara, determined to live. For this revolutionary decision, which the samurai code calls the height of dishonor, Musashi becomes an outlaw.

Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor for Doubleday.

Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor for Doubleday.

Three transgressions make the young man’s life forfeit. First, he fought for a lord on the losing side, for which Musashi should have committed seppuku, ritual suicide. However, he’s long detested that custom and goes into hiding instead. Second, he’s accused of having insulted a warrior from a powerful clan whom he slew in single combat, a charge he denies, to no avail. Thirdly, and most significantly, he announces to all and sundry that seppuku is criminal nonsense; that the samurai code, known to initiates as “the Way,” is morally false; and that any man who kills for a cause other than his own–as when a lord commands him to–is a coward. Not content with that, Musashi takes these views on the road, trying to prevent seppuku when he happens across it, and fending off the samurai despatched to kill him.

In other hands, perhaps, this arresting premise would merely provide excuses for grisly combat, of which there’s no shortage here, or an adventure story that makes the pages turn rapidly, as these do. But Kirk has much bigger psychological, political, and moral game in mind, and his epic sweep, focus on justice, and using a specific case to portray an entire society remind me of Kurosawa films like Rashomon or Seven Samurai. Throughout the novel, characters constantly challenge themselves and others to define what the purpose of violence is, and what an individual person is to make of that.

As a fellow fugitive from the Way haltingly observes:

What difference, what individual difference, did you and I make at Sekigahara? . . . Yet our army lost, and so we two must bear the shame. To be hated. What if our army had won? We would be loved, and yet we would have had the exact same effect upon the victory. Would have had . . . what we had before. But magnified. And what would we have done to earn it? Nothing. No. No. It is as though we . . . as though human beings are . . . buckets or, or, or . . . vessels.

Yet nothing’s so simple. Musashi sees no other choice–indeed, he seeks no other–than to prove by the sword that the Way is bankrupt. The contradiction is obvious, but not to Musashi, who believes he’s honest because he fights only for himself and his ideals. He assumes that each martial victory will convince other samurai to abandon the Way, and he’s astounded when they respond by trying to attack him.

But there’s more. The samurai sent to kill him, Akiyama, is himself an outcast, and Kirk exploits that, leading Akiyama to question why he’s been sent on this mission, and what, precisely, is the moral threat that his quarry represents. Along the way, Musashi lands with a blind woman and a young girl who challenge his assumptions, and among whom he becomes a different person from the raging swordsman who enjoys the combat at which he’s preternaturally gifted.

Is there yet more? Yes, there is. Musashi’s quest brings him to Kyoto, where an uneasy peace simmers with conflict. The Tokugawa Shogunate, the victors of Sekigahara, have moved the capital to Edo (modern-day Tokyo) and left behind a military governor. Many people in Kyoto resent the Tokugawa for that, perhaps none more than the Yoshioka, a famous samurai school. It’s their champion whom Musashi allegedly insulted at the battle, and they’re a political power in the city. Staying out of trouble is therefore a full-time job for Musashi, and he’s no good at it.

Sword of Honor follows Child of Vengeance, which I reviewed December 8, 2014. Each stands on its own, though the precursor shows how Musashi has always had a dual nature, with healing impulses as well as violent ones. Sword of Honor is a deeper, more proficient novel, though, and I’m glad to see that Kirk has taken to showing his characters’ emotions more often than telling them, a flaw that marred the previous book at times. I could have done with fewer, less grisly battle scenes, but none seemed gratuitous, and there’s no denying that the samurai world, as with any knightly class, was based on violence.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher, in return for an honest review.

Dance or Dangle?

22 Monday Dec 2014

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Review: The Day of Atonement, by David Liss
Random House, 2014. 365 pp. $28

“Only a few hours in Lisbon, without even setting foot on land, and I had set things in motion,” says Sebastian Foxx, the protagonist of this revenge tale, set in 1745. “These people–my enemies–already danced upon my string. Unless I dangled upon their rope. That was also a possibility.”

It’s an accurate judgment, and for virtually the entire novel, neither Sebastian nor the reader can ever be sure whether a dance or a dangle is taking place, or who’s in control. All you do know is that Sebastian isn’t who he says he is, and that merely by entering Lisbon, he may be arrested, tortured, and killed any hour. Ditto the people he’s trying to help.

His real name is Sebastião Raposa, and to the Inquisition, he’s a heretic. Yes, the Inquisition still rules in 1745, and, as described in The Day of Atonement, its agents are a frighteningly efficient eighteenth-century Gestapo, except that they wear priestly robes instead of leather coats and trilbys. Their goal is to rid the city of New Christians–families that converted from Judaism generations before but forever suspect as nonbelievers–and to seize their property. The accusations are false, but that doesn’t matter. Under torture, the victim confesses and names accomplices.

Seal of the Inquisition. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Seal of the Inquisition. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

When Sebastião was thirteen, someone had heard that his family was saving up money to flee this impossible trap, and charged them with heresy. Sebastião’s parents spirited him out of the country, but they remained to endure imprisonment and death. He landed in England, under the care and tutelage of Benjamin Weaver, former pugilist and current thief hunter, whom Liss fans know from other novels.

Now, as Sebastian Foxx, the young man has returned to his forefathers’ Jewish faith, and, in Lisbon, to kill his family’s accusers and the Inquisitor responsible for their deaths. He also dreams of finding Gabriela, his first love, whose family was denounced at the same time as his, and to return to England with her. What a mad, pointless scheme; as an old Lisbon friend tells him, taking on the Inquisition “is like taking revenge against the ocean to avenge a drowning.”

However, Sebastian doesn’t care what happens to him and feels no fear (or much of anything else), so numbed is he by his emotional losses. Fueled by fury, he’s a dangerous rival, capable of violence to a degree that startles everyone, even his mentor.

Nevertheless, he also means to do right, which makes The Day of Atonement a moral tale as well as a thriller, an exploration of the use and misuse of violence. While trying to decide who’s a villain, he acquires more victims to rescue, who also suffer as a result, giving him further sins to expiate. Hence the title: Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, requires more than fasting, prayer, and reflection. To obtain forgiveness, the penitent must seek it from the person he has wronged. Sebastian believes that if he can atone properly–free himself of his anger and right great wrongs–he can be whole again.

I like this setup, and Liss carries its promise to conclusion. He knows how to string out a confrontation, letting the tension rise and fall, only to rise again, in a way you hadn’t anticipated. I think of this as a kind of “no–and furthermore ,” in which a character supposes he’s getting somewhere, only to find out he’s not–and, furthermore, winds up in worse trouble. Whether it’s a twist of circumstance, a betrayal, or an unexpected task to fulfill, Liss piles on the “no–and furthermores” until you have no idea what’s flying, precisely Sebastian’s viewpoint.

A couple of the violent scenes (and there are many) seem Hollywood to me, and Sebastian passes through an emotional transition or two that appear too easy. Even so, of the six David Liss novels I’ve read, The Day of Atonement is my favorite since The Whiskey Rebels (2008).

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

More fine print: This week and next, I’ll be on vacation, so will post only once each week.