The Coming by Andrej Nikolaidis

Published in Montenegro in 2003; published in translation by Dzanc Books and Open Road Media on December 17, 2013

"What is history but a crime story with humanity as its cast?" A character in The Coming asks that question while discussing predictions of the Apocalypse made by some of history's famous figures, but the question serves as a statement of the novel's primary theme. The Coming takes the guise of a detective novel, but it has little in common with the genre's ordinary conventions. It takes place in the midst of worldwide apocalyptic events: earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches, rising sea levels, frogs raining from the sky, and a mid-summer blizzard in Ulcinj. Most people in Ulcinj (where the novel is set) have given up work and are waiting for the end times, but since they didn't do much work in the best of times, the difference is barely noticeable. When we hear about the MTV Apocalypse Awards, it becomes clear that The Coming will work elements of satire into the story, but this isn't a light-hearted comedy. The characters tell ironic stories of difficult lives (their own and others they have known), lifelong suffering to which they were condemned because of their birthplace and because they "are all victims of our parents' inability to resist the reproductive urge." Their lives are crime stories of a different sort.

Perhaps the Apocalypse will finally reveal the truth that people crave. The nature of truth is another of the novel's themes. One of the novel's two central characters is a private detective, hired to find the truth about the violent murder of a family in Ulcinj. While the detective tries to project the image of a hard-boiled Sam Spade (because that's what he assumes his clients want), he's actually more of a philosopher-storyteller. His job is not to discover the truth but to invent the truth that the client needs to hear.

Point of view shifts back and forth between the detective and Emmanuel, who reads about the murders in the newspaper and believes he understands the crime's true purpose. But is Emmanuel's understanding of the truth reliable? Emmanuel is confined (for his own good, he repeatedly tells us) in an institution. He is convinced that his actions and thoughts have terrible consequences for people he doesn't know. Many of Emmanuel's far-ranging thoughts focus on Sabbatai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah who lived in seventeenth century Istanbul, attracted followers (as prophets tend to do), converted to Islam to avoid execution while continuing to claim he was the Messiah, and was exiled (accompanied by his followers) to the pirate city of Ulcinj, where he became obsessed with the "false" (and competing) prophet Fra Dolcino. Emmanuel tells of a battle of books that tell competing truths, one authored by Dolcino and two by Zevi, one filled with "just about as much truth as the world can bear" while the other, The Book of the Coming, tells the real truth.

The Coming is a brief, thought-provoking novel written in prose that is engaging and clever. In part, it is a book about books: their importance, their symbolic value, their role in the life of a society, their relationship to truth, illusion, and deception. In part, it is about the relationship between parents and their children. The novel covers a large amount of ground with relatively few words. The detective and Emmanuel are both philosophers of a sort, opining about the human condition from their own unusual perspectives. The detective's view is understandably jaded while Emmanuel's might be the view of a madman, but they both shed light upon the mysteries of life.

RECOMMENDED

The Prince of Risk by Christopher Reich

Published by Doubleday on December 3, 2013

A conspiracy is afoot and the only (good) people who know about it are the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange. Until they die. Just before their car explodes on the White House lawn, the head of the NYSE texts the word Palantir to his estranged son, hedge fund master Bobby Astor, whose ex-wife, Alex Forza, happens to be an FBI agent. Astor has no idea what Palantir means, but he is determined to find out. The conspirators, of course, are aware of the text, knowledge that puts Astor's life in peril. In the meantime, Astor has made a bet that Chinese currency will be devalued, a gamble that places him in financial peril, to the extent of losing 400 million dollars.

Global conspiracies are plentiful and far-reaching in the word of thrillers. This one involves electronic surveillance of 57,000 influential people (mostly in government and business). Impressive but credible, given the resources of the conspiracy's backers. Is the conspiracy farfetched? In some respects, yes, but no more farfetched than is common in modern thrillers. Apart from one scene at the end, nothing about the story made me unwilling to suspend my disbelief, in part because Reich includes convincing detail about the conspiracy's design. Of course, a reader who is more knowledgeable about software or the mechanics of Wall Street financial transactions might not be as easily convinced as I was. And even to the extent that I was unconvinced, the story is so fun that I easily overcame my skepticism.

The story features -- wait for it -- a warrior monk. I have to admit that I wasn't expecting a warrior monk to show up on Wall Street, but Reich somehow makes it work. In fact, Reich makes a lot of things work together in this entertaining joinder of a financial thriller with an international conspiracy thriller. He builds tension as several storylines weave together and he advances the plot at a steady pace. His characters are flawed in ways that make them interesting but they never become thoroughly unlikable. Alex's characterization as a self-righteous a-hole is realistic, even if the prayers she says while standing before a portrait of J. Edgar Hoover are a little over-the-top. At the same time, these are the conventional characters of genre fiction, developed without richness or texture. That's one of the novel's only weakness, and it's a small one given that this is a plot-driven story. The other, again small, is that the plot features few surprises (other than the appearance of a warrior monk), but I enjoyed it all the same.

RECOMMENDED

Asunder by Chloe Aridjis

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on September 17, 2013

As much a work of philosophy as fiction, Asunder is an impressive examination of the search for meaning in a solitary life. On one level, it is a love letter to art museums and their contents, the works of art and the humans who admire them. On another, it is a story of entropy, and of one woman's struggle to resist its pull.

Marie loves art, so hers seems to be the ideal job. She is a guard at the National Gallery, a career that lets her sit or stand all day, mostly unnoticed, contemplating art. Her friend Daniel was fired for excessive pacing and now works at Tate Britain, where the modern art troubled him before he adapted. Marie is content to be motionless and, like Daniel, she prefers to protect the old masters. In her free time she creates miniature landscapes from eggshells and moths. They are fantasy worlds into which time collapses, but eventually the moths disintegrate.

During the course of the novel, we learn about Marie's great-grandfather, who was a warder at the National Gallery in 1914, when a suffragette took a meat cleaver to a painting in an act of political protest; about Camden, where Marie spent her younger years and where, on a shopping trip with her morose flatmate, she reencounters her former lover; about Daniel's poetry and his penpal friendships with an international selection of poets he has never met; about the women who were once regarded as hysterics, posed and photographed for the benefit of their observers; and about Marie's long-abandoned penpal relationship with a prisoner (an example of the safely unavailable men to whom she is always drawn). We also learn about craquelure, the network of cracks that mark (and add depth to) an aging painting, and are invited to consider the quiet and largely unnoticed decomposition of paintings as a metaphor for life. Like paintings, people are always in the process of cracking apart, but they also gain a kind of hidden beauty as they age.

The first half of Asunder seems like an amiable character-centered novel with little in the way of plot development. A bit of understated drama ensues in the second half, when Marie and Daniel visit Paris to take advantage of an empty apartment that belongs to one of Daniel's unmet poet-friends. There they encounter some odd characters, including pensive Pierre, a poet from Stockholm who, in his rare waking moments, exerts an unnatural influence over Daniel -- or so it appears to the disgruntled Marie. One of the characters we meet is present for only a few pages but he plays a vital role. He is a living example of entropy, a man whose life has come apart.

Readers looking for plot-heavy, action-filled stories should look elsewhere. Asunder is not uneventful, but the events are small, and the reader needs to weave them together, to search for commonalities, to understand their importance. The key event comes near the novel's end, as Marie must decide how she wants to live her life. We might all disintegrate in the end, Chloe Aridjis seems to be saying, but we can embrace the inevitability of own craquelure and make the most of the time we have before we disintegrate.

RECOMMENDED

Cross and Burn by Val McDermid

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on October 22, 2013

Carol Jordan, unemployed and burdened by her sense of guilt for her brother's death, is getting her life back together (or not) by restoring the barn in which her brother was murdered and by caring for a new dog. Paula McIntyre, a member of Jordan's Major Incident Team with the Bradfield Metropolitan Police before it was broken apart, is newly promoted to Detective Sergeant. Paula would like to investigate the disappearance of Bev McAndrew, whose 14-year-old son is disturbed that she didn't come home, but Paula's new DCI puts her to work on a brutal homicide instead. Paula nonetheless devotes herself to investigating McAndrew's disappearance because disobeying their bosses is standard procedure for fictional police detectives. Soon enough, we learn that a serial killer is kidnapping, tormenting, and killing women who happen to look like Carol. Eventually the evidence points to an unlikely suspect, and it is up to Paula to determine whether that series regular is innocent or guilty.

Val McDermid understands the tendency of police detectives to focus their tunnel vision on the first suspect they encounter, working thereafter to prove that suspect's guilt rather than continuing an open-minded investigation. She also recognizes the tendency of police officers to believe that everyone is entitled to a defense except the suspects they arrest, who are by definition guilty scum undeserving of a presumption of innocence. Paula's obnoxious DCI, who succumbs to both those tendencies, is the novel's most realistic character.

Point of view rotates through the cast of characters, including various victims of the serial killer. One of the more prominent characters is Carol's former love interest, Tony Hill, a psychologist who doubles as a profiler. Like most fictional profilers, Tony has analytical powers that border on the psychic. He is also a good friend of Paula, who is tedious in her insistence that she is soooo very compassionate and cares soooo much about victims, unlike all the people who make her soooo angry because they have soooo little compassion. Both Tony and Paula are obnoxiously self-aggrandizing.

Carol's personality is similar to Paula's except that she's even more ridiculously judgmental. Carol is tedious in her insistence that the police are always pure of heart and that criminals are always monsters. That's bad enough, but she's just as harsh when it comes to judging her friends. Sometimes there's value in making a protagonist disagreeable, but I found little value in reading about Carol, in part because much of her anger seems artificial, a contrivance that allows Carol to make deep and meaningful adjustments in her thinking before the novel is over, leaving her fans smiling because Carol once again becomes the justice-craving person her fans want her to be. It's just too obvious to be compelling drama, and in any event, she's still a shallow binary thinker at the novel's end.

McDermid's bad guys are consistent with Carol's binary view of the world. There is no nuance in McDermid's cartoonish depiction of purely evil villains. Her descriptions of the serial killer's formative years are both unimaginative and unconvincing.

Characters frequently interrupt the plot to talk about their failed romances or their relationship anxiety or to "listen to each other's pain." They're so busy being a support group for each other that it's amazing they have time to do any police work. The conversations are a dull drag on the novel's momentum.

The plot hinges on too many unlikely coincidences. Coincidences happen all the time so I'm willing to give writers the benefit of their use, but when they start to pile up, the plot loses its credibility. The ending is much too tidy, and the novel loses credibility points there, as well. Still, the story moves quickly and McDermid's unblemished prose style is easy to read. The novel held my attention despite its unlikable characters and unconvincing plot. Series fans will no doubt like Cross and Burn more than I did.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Comets! by David J. Eicher

Published by Cambridge University Press on November 27, 2013

David J. Eicher is a lifelong fan of comets. His enthusiasm is reflected in the exclamation point in the book's title and in his discussion of the subject matter. Eicher isn't the most scintillating science writer I've encountered -- Comets! is disorganized and too often redundant -- but his prose is reasonably lively and he packs a good bit of interesting information into a fairly short book without becoming too "sciency." In other words, this is a book the casual reader can appreciate.

Eicher gives the reader a short history of comet observers, featuring familiar names like Thomas Aquinas, Edmond Halley, and Carl Sagan, as well as many that (to me, at least) are less well known. He devotes a later chapter to the hobby (or passion) of comet hunting. He catalogs comets that have coincided with historic events (Halley's Comet, in particular, has often been regarded as a good or bad omen, depending on what side of history the observer was rooting for). He discusses comets as a component of cultural history, from Aristotle and Seneca to Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy. Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were among the early astronomers who pondered and debated the nature of comets, as did Chinese sky watchers and Louis XIV. He also describes more recent observations of comets, some more interesting than others (Hale-Bopp, which was linked to the Heaven's Gate suicides, and Kohoutek, which turned out to be a dud as compared to predictions of the awe it would inspire, are the best of these). Eicher writes intriguing descriptions of "flybys" by spacecraft that have flown near (and sometimes into) comets and their tails, taking pictures and gathering samples. Several of the resulting photographs (which tend to reveal comets as rocks shaped like cosmic potatoes) are reproduced in the book.

A chapter that explains the composition of comets is a bit dry (although I appreciate Eicher's candor in admitting how much of that explanation is educated guesswork). It's interesting, in fact, to learn how little is known about comet formation and disintegration, about the differences between different comets, and about the unclear distinction between asteroids and comets. Did comets deliver the water and amino acids to Earth that made human life possible? Did comets, in fact, bring life to Earth? Are comets seeding life throughout the universe? Maybe, but many unanswered questions would need to be resolved before any of those possibilities could move from speculation to well-supported theory.

A chapter on where comets live and how they die is informative but, like other parts of the book, seems a bit padded with historical theories that have been supplanted by better information. A final chapter filled with technical tips for imaging comets will be of greater interest to night sky photographers than it was to me.

Of course, what we really want to know is whether a comet is likely to blast into the Earth's atmosphere and destroy all life on the planet (or maybe just Canada). A comet might have exploded over Siberia in 1908 but the jury is still out. Maybe it was an asteroid, not that it matters much to the Siberian tigers who were unlucky enough to be caught in the explosion. In any event, Eicher tells us that space debris pummels the Earth all the time and that Jupiter was smacked by a comet in 1994, so it's not inconceivable that a comet has Earth's number. With so many more imminent threats to human existence looming, I'm not going to lose sleep over that one.

RECOMMENDED