The Lantern of Lost Memories by Sanaka Hiiraki

Publsihed in Japan in 2019; published in translation by ‎ Grand Central Publishing on September 17, 2024

When Hatsu Yagi, at the age of 92, finds herself in a photography studio with no memory of her arrival, she realizes she is dead. The photographer, Hirasaka, tells her she is making a brief stop at the precise boundary between life and death on her way to an afterlife that he hasn’t experienced and thus cannot describe.

Hirasaka gives Hatsu large stacks of photographs, one photo of each day of her life, and asks her to select one from each year to attach to the lantern of memories. When her life flashes before her eyes as the lantern spins, she will see the scenes that she chooses before passing into the next stage.

One of the photos is faded because it’s such an important memory that Hatsu has worn it out by revisiting it so often. Hirasaka takes her back in time so she can take a new photo. She’ll be a ghost in the sense that others won’t see her, but she’s solid enough to take a picture.

When they travel to 1948, Hatsu tells Hirasaka the story of a small neighborhood in Tokyo where she worked as a nursery schoolteacher in a daycare that met in a field before it raised enough money to buy an old bus that would shelter the children when it rained. The story of her life is touching and sweet. The novel is in part a remembrance of the hard times that followed Japan’s defeat in the war, a life that was particularly difficult for all the children who died of dysentery.

Hirasaka’s next guest is Waniguchi, a criminal who was stabbed to death in his forties. The criminal tells an amusing story about an employee named Mouse who fixes things, although Mouse doesn’t understand the difference between broken and dead. Some things, Mouse will eventually learn, can’t be fixed. As Waniguichi’s lantern spins, he contemplates all the wrong choices he made, all the paths he took when different paths at life’s crossroads might have spared him a grisly death.

Hirasaka helps the dead decorate their lanterns with photographs, but he doesn’t remember his own life. He believes he lived a boring life, that he is unremembered, that he is destined to have a boring existence between life and death, without any meaning or purpose. He has a photograph of himself, but he doesn’t recognize the setting and it hasn’t sparked any memories of his life. This is a mystery that the story eventually explains. The explanation underscores the theme that a boring existence can nevertheless be special in ways we can’t imagine.

The last meeting recounted in the novel is with an abused little girl named Mitsuru. She died and visited Hirasaka, but he knows she is destined to return to life, only to die again at the hands of her tormenter. That might be the saddest thing I’ve ever read. As he interacts with the girl, he finds a way to manipulate the rules and, in so doing, changes his own fate.

The story’s characters are memorable (I particularly liked Mouse). The novel’s clever construction ties the characters together in surprising ways. The story illustrates the power of photography and the importance of capturing images that might erode in an unassisted memory. I don’t like to use clichéd descriptions like “enriching” and “life affirming,” but if I resorted to clichés, those would be apt descriptions of The Lantern of Lost Memories.

The story’s point, I think, is that most people live "well out of the spotlight." They have an “undistinguished existence” with “no stirring accomplishments or feats of valour,” ending their lives as people who “never expected to amount to much, and never had.” Yet Sanaka Hiiragi illustrates how even ordinary people make a difference. In the words of David Bowie, we can be heroes, just for one day. Or we can make bad choices and be left with a stack of memories we’d rather not have. Other writers have taught the same lesson, but rarely with the degree of empathy and intelligence that Hiiragi brings to this story.

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Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on September 24, 2024

Shakespeare exercised dramatic license in the Scottish play by having Macduff kill Macbeth in his castle. As history records it, Macbeth was killed by forces loyal to Malcolm in the Battle of Lumphanan. Val McDermid’s take differs from both accounts, although she follows history more closely than Shakespeare did. Still, just like Shakespeare but without the glorious prose, she spins history into fiction.

Queen Gruoch Macbeth shared a throne with her husband for seventeen years before the Battle of Lumphanan robbed her of his love and sent her into exile. Gruoch is keeping her distance from Malcolm as she considers her future. She has “a name men would rally behind; Malcolm is shrewd enough to realize that, and to fear it.” The novel is thus, at least initially, the imagined story of Gruoch as she struggles to survive in hiding while grieving her husband’s death.

The novel’s backstory is told in flashbacks. Gruoch was with Gille Coemgáin in an arranged and childless marriage. Macbeth heard that his cousin Gille’s hands were red with the blood of his father. Macbeth came to see him so he could judge the man’s guilt before taking his revenge. When they met, Gruoch believed that Macbeth looked at her “like the woman she was meant to be.”

One of the three women who attend Grunoch, a handmaiden named Eithne who is said to be a witch, told her that Macbeth “will be the one. He will surely plant a King.” Grunoch needs no further encouragement. Suffice it to say that there will be passages worthy of inclusion in an adult romance novel.

To avoid the risk of making Gille suspicious, Grunoch and Macbeth communicate by sending bunches of flowers to each other via Angus, Macbeth’s messenger. One of Grunoch’s trusted women is an herbalist who speaks the language of flowers. Macbeth has an herbalist who also serves as translator. Their bouquets speak of patience (wild garlic) and hardship (milk-gowan), but no translation is needed for the forget-me-nots. That’s clever.

McDermid completes the backstory by imagining that Macbeth takes a grisly revenge through means that are consistent with history. In the present-time narrative, Gruoch struggles to keep her band of women safe until Eithne enters a trance and tells her to “go west — all the way west.” She must evade or slay Malcolm’s spies and fight McDuff before the story takes a twist that marks a sharp departure from history.

The happy ending has all the credibility of a fairy tale, although I credit McDermid for subplots that follow a tragic path. I mean, you can’t have a Macbeth story without tragedy, so likable but less important characters will meet their unhappy fates before the last curtain falls.

I’m not sure Macbeth needs a sequel, although writers seem to enjoy writing them. McDermid is no Shakespeare, but who is? Her prose is clear and crisp while occasionally bordering on elegance. Action and adventure (and the occasional stabbing) move the plot briskly. The story’s charm won’t be lost on fans of Macbeth even if they might cringe at its non-tragic outcome.

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Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Published by ‎ Scribner on September 3, 2024

Rachel Kushner devoted Creation Lake to the creation of a female character who refuses to regret the dubious path she has chosen. The character uses the name Sadie Smith, a name she will discard by the novel’s end. Sadie has made a career of working undercover. While she is schooled in deceit, she is reasonably honest with the reader about her checkered life. Sadie isn’t someone who much cares what you think of her.

Sadie’s backstory includes an aborted career working for the FBI. She infiltrated organizations of drug dealers but her later focus was on environmental/political activists. Federal authorities brand activists as “terrorists” if they do anything to disrupt business or government operations. Sadie understands but is indifferent to the reality that her job is more about generating good press for the FBI than about fighting actual terrorism.

To the extent that Sadie fights crime, she does so by using her looks and breasts to win the trust of men. During her final mission as a government agent, her supervisor pressured her to find (or, saying the silent part out loud, to manufacture) evidence that an animal rights group was planning to commit violent acts of sabotage. Sadie convinced a young man that he would have a chance with her if he proved his commitment by taking direct action in support of their cause. Following Sadie's instructions, he purchased fertilizer to make a bomb and delivered it to a woman who was the FBI’s real target.

To the surprise of everyone, a jury accepted the boy’s entrapment defense. His embarrassing acquittal deprived the FBI of a chance to claim a victory in the war against terrorism. Professing to be shocked that one of their agents would entrap an innocent person, the FBI fired Sadie, sending her into the more lucrative world of private clandestine employment.

The entrapped activists would like to sue Sadie but haven’t yet discovered her true identity. Near the novel’s end, Sadie becomes concerned that the FBI might reveal that information to make her a scapegoat. If she regrets setting up an innocent boy for a potentially lengthy prison sentence, her regret is based on her loss of employment and future consequences that she might face. She appears to feel no guilt, having convinced herself that she had “no choice but to plant the idea of violence in the boy’s head, since he was doing a poor job of coming to it on his own.”

Now Sadie is pretending to be the girlfriend of Lucien Dubois. She is staying in his (otherwise empty) family house in the Guyenne Valley, a rural area in southwestern France where the commune of Le Moulin is located. The Moulinards are environmental activists who, like most activists, are well-meaning but generally ineffectual. Their most urgent concern is that industry wants to divert water for its own uses without regard to the impact that loss of water will have on local farmers.

Sadie has been hired to keep tabs on the Moulinards by unseen interests with a hidden agenda. She soon manages to insinuate herself into the organization.

Some of the novel’s interest lies in its depiction of squabbling activists who might agree about broad goals while disagreeing about the means of achieving them. Some activists view violence as a tool while others reject it. Some believe capitalism will collapse on its own while others want to precipitate a worker’s revolution. Whether their actions advance or undermine their cause is unclear, although taking action seems to be less important to most of them than the intellectual exercise of debating the purpose and methodology of activism.

Sadie’s employers have outfitted her with technology that allows her to read email exchanges between Bruno Lacombe and Le Moulin’s leader, Pascal Balmy. Sadie believes that Bruno, as Pascal’s mentor, would want to guide Pascal’s strategy for hindering industrial development in the valley, but most of Bruno’s emails discuss his theories about Neanderthals, theories he developed while living in a cave. Bruno is “anti-civ,” or against civilization in the parlance of French activism, although he might best be seen as a tragic figure who responded to the death of his daughter (run over by Bruno’s own tractor) by rejecting farming and most human interaction. Lacombe now believes it is time for mankind to return to the caves, to live in “tiny clans,” a recipe for a future that seems more post-apocalyptic than visionary.

Bruno’s obsession with Neanderthals opens the door for informative discussions of archeology and evolution, language and war. For example, Bruno distinguishes his preference for cave dwelling from living in a bunker to avoid nuclear annihilation. “In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.” In the cave, Bruno can hear everything, including languages he doesn’t understand, prompting him to comment upon the development of language.

Kushner seems to use Neanderthals and environmental activism and even the choice of sex partners to develop a deeper theme about human progress, but the precise definition of that theme is open to debate. Perhaps book clubs will be able to ferret it out.

The novel explores several other topics, including the French Revolution, map making in the time of Captain Cook, and the tendency to mistake random luck for fate. These are interesting discussions even if they do not obviously advance the plot. Repeated references to Guy Debord, a Marxist theorist who influenced Pascal, fit more comfortably into the story, although the characters are primarily interested in whether Debord is worthy of a place in the activist pantheon, given his incestuous relationship with his sister. 

Speaking of the plot, Sadie manipulates Lucien to connect her with Le Moulin. Believing Sadie to be an unemployed American grad student, Lucien arranges for Sadie to translate into English a book that Pascal and the other Moulinards are writing. She dutifully spies on the activists and takes the opportunity to shag one because “even as I maintained a fraudulent persona, within that persona I found methods to meet real needs.”

As Sadie discharges her duties to her employer, she is again asked to set up an act of violence that would not occur without her intervention. The reader will wonder whether Sadie learned anything from her earlier experience with entrapment and whether that experience will shape her response to her employer’s deadly demand.

While I wouldn’t categorize Creation Lake as a thriller, the story does build tension by raising concern about Sarah’s fate as an undercover operative. Perhaps because Kushner focuses on ideas and characterization, the novel’s pace is uneven. Few novels can be everything to every reader; those looking for an action novel might be disappointed by Creation Lake. Still, a fast-moving scene near the end provides a satisfying, if anti-climactic, answer to whether Sadie's effort to set up the Moulinards will succeed.

Sadie is an interesting character but isn’t particularly sympathetic. Some readers might find Kushner’s digressions into the purpose of Neanderthal cave paintings to be distracting. I would agree that, while the novel's various asides are interesting, they add unnecessary words to the book. The words are nevertheless wielded with great skill and the novel is a welcome departure from formulaic spy/undercover cop stories.

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Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 13, 2024

The stories in Highway Thirteen are linked by Paul Biga, a (fictional) serial killer who abducted and kidnapped a dozen girls he found walking on an Australian highway between 1990 and 1997. The stories take place at different times over the last fifty years, apart from one set in 1950 and another in 2028. Taken together, they examine the impact that a single criminal had on multiple lives across time and continents.

I was impressed by nine of the twelve stories, a higher average than is typical for a short story collection. A couple of stories are about secret thoughts. In “Tourists,” a walk in a forest where a serial killer buried his victims might spark an office romance — or a rejection. During the walk, the woman senses evil, while the man envisions himself killing his walking companion.

Also based on hidden thoughts, “Hunter on the Highway” (my favorite story in the book) takes place after a female hitchhiker is attacked. The victim’s description of her attacker matches May’s boyfriend. He’s an uncomplicated, likable bar band musician but does she really know him? Will she talk herself into believing that he’s a killer and calling a hotline to report her suspicion? The story has something important to say about how media hype associated with crime pollutes the heads of people who begin to see criminals everywhere.

“Demolition” builds on familiar news interviews of neighbors who say that the serial killer next door kept to himself and was “just a little off.” Paul Biga lived across the street from Eva. When he was a child, he helped her with gardening. As a retired teacher who taught Biga, she knows that all adolescents are strange and bewildered. Paul did not seem unusually strange, although she didn’t tell the journalist who interviewed her (for the second time, on the occasion of Biga’s home’s demolition) about the disturbing letter he wrote her.

A couple of other stories are also based on memories. The Englishman in “Abroad” attempts to cope with Halloween in America, a celebration of the supernatural that forces him to acknowledge memories of his sister’s unexplained disappearance in Australia when he was a child and how it changed his father’s life. In “Hostess,” a retired flight attendant reflects with melancholy upon the time he shared a home, and sometimes a bed, with another retired flight attendant and her faithful dog. The connection to Biga comes from the female flight attendant’s attempt to persuade her sister to end her engagement to an older man who (in the flight attendant’s opinion) is creepy.

“Fat Suit” is about an Australian actor whose Hollywood marriage is breaking up just as he begins filming a movie in which he plays the famous serial killer (he got fat after years in jail). The story illustrates how one thought sparks another as the actor contemplates his father’s death, his failed marriage, his relationship with his stepchildren, and whales.

While a majority of the stories are serious, some are infused with dark humor. The narrator of “Hostel” tells the story of Mandy and Roy, who like to tell the story of the Swiss backpacker they found weeping outside a hostel — a girl who later was murdered. The narrator imagines herself in the Swiss girl’s position as she entertains fantasies about Roy. “Hostel” uses humor to capture the truth of its characters: “It’s not that Mandy was vain; she just liked to be good at everything she did. So she liked to be good at having a body.”

Fiona McFarlane’s humor is fully displayed in “Democracy Sausage.” A political candidate named Biga isn’t sure whether he is related to the infamous serial killer, but he questions whether voters will disassociate him from his “blackened” name. While Biga is hosting a backyard barbeque, a dog “came springing out from the underbrush of a local riverside path with, between his teeth, a large rubber dildo, the colour of fair flesh but streaked with silty mud, resembling nothing so much as a poorly barbequed sausage.”

Set in 2028, “Podcast” is written in the form of a transcript of a very funny true crime podcast. A recently discovered body that might be linked to Biga (now eight years dead) is the podcast’s subject, although the discussion is quickly diverted to a gossipy account of a podcaster’s gay marriage (his husband doesn’t understand the true crime obsession) and speculation about life in Australia, a country the podcasters have never visited. The podcast tangentially addresses the concept of murder as entertainment, which is an apt description of true crime books, movies, TV shows, and podcasts.

The way in which McFarlane links such diverse stories is dazzling. Biga is in the background of each story, sometimes so tangentially that it takes a bit of effort to understand how he relates to the story’s characters, yet the stories shy away from the gruesome details of murder. They touch instead on the lives of people who feel the impact of Biga’s crimes, sometimes without even knowing that a crime occurred. Many of the individual stories are memorable. Collectively, they gain additional power. Highway Thirteen might be a good choice for a crime fiction book club in search of an offbeat offering that moves beyond the genre's cliches.

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The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

Published by Viking on July 16, 2024

The Bright Sword takes place at the end of the time of magic. King Arthur is believed to be dead. Without his guidance, Britain is changing. Change is irreversible, but the future can be shaped. The few remaining knights of the Round Table feel a duty to choose Arthur’s successor and to defend Camelot from attack by lesser kings.

After the battle in which Arthur was lost, the Round Table is 94 knights short of a quorum. Having failed to save Arthur, Lancelot is living in a monastery, where he plans to spend his life in total seclusion. He is trying to atone for his many sins. Canoodling with Queen Guinevere seems to be high on that list.

The rollicking story begins with and focuses upon young Callum, who journeys to Camelot with a plan to beg Arthur for a position as a knight at the Round Table. Callum acquits himself in an unexpected encounter with a knight as he travels to Camelot. The knight’s identity, when finally revealed, fits well within the tradition of Arthurian tales.

Callum is dismayed to learn of Arthur’s death. The surviving knights seem to have lost their purpose. Britain has been forced into an early version of Brexit by the loss of its unifying force. Competing claims for the throne distress the knights, who aren’t used to making nakedly political decisions.

After winning a challenge, Callum is invited to join the group and to undertake new quests that will eventually determine Britain’s leadership. Adventures ensue, including encounters with magicians, giants, gods, the Lady of the Lake, and other characters drawn from Arthurian legend. From jousting competitions to farmers armed with pitchforks running across a field toward knights in armor, Lev Grossman assures that action scenes will keep the story from dragging. Yet the novel’s real interest lies more in its characters than in their adventures.

Backstories occupy much of the plot. We learn how Callum acquired the skills of a knight when he wasn’t being abused by his employer. We learn about the eventful lives of Sir Bedivere, Sir Dinadan, Sir Dagonet, Sir Constantin, and Sir Scipio. Gawain plays a small role in the story, but it’s appropriate for some of the lesser knights to enter the spotlight.

The knights were a diverse bunch. Bedivere’s physical longing for Arthur explains his loyalty. We hear less about the well-known past of Sir Lancelot, but we see him in the present, where living up to his legend proves to be his greatest challenge.

We don’t hear much about Merlin’s past but he plays a key role, often in battle with his former apprentice, Nimue. The story’s gossipy style exposes Nimue’s plan to seduce one of the knights. Whether she needed the assist of magic is not quite clear, even to Nimue.

The most interesting backstory belongs to Sir Palomides. The former prince of Baghdad is more intellectual than the other knights. Still, he found the struggle between Islam and Christianity to be less troublesome than his struggle for the love of Isolde.

By the end, most characters are transformed by adventures that expose them to miracles and force them to do (or attempt) great deeds. Just when it seems that their lives will normalize, along comes another invasion. That’s British history in a nutshell. “Change is the only certainty.” That’s also the ultimate lesson that the reader — like each character — is invited to internalize.

Yet the novel’s most profound question is one a knight contemplates in the moments before his death: “why it should be that we are made for a bright world, but live in a dark one.” In that respect, the world of Arthur parallels and continues to illuminate the modern world.

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