Until Tuesday by Luis Carlos Montalván

Published by Hyperion on May 3, 2011

Until Tuesday is much more than the feel-good story about service dogs I was expecting.  Luis Carlos Montalván's book provides a brief but uncompromising look at the conduct of America’s most recent military incursion into Iraq and the impact it had on soldiers who were placed in impossible positions.  It also indicts businesses that discriminate against assistance dogs.  None of that should put off dog lovers who want a feel-good story; Montalván’s relationship with Tuesday, his golden retriever, is at the book’s heart, and it is deeply moving.

The first three chapters imaginatively recreate Tuesday’s training, including a look at Tuesday’s life in prison while he participated in the Puppies Behind Bars program, bonding with an inmate and helping the inmate hold onto his humanity in an inhumane environment.  Tuesday also put in time at Children’s Village, where troubled kids learn about responsibility and success by helping to train service dogs.

The next five chapters tell Montalván’s story.  It mirrors writing that came out of the Vietnam War in its complaint that the nation’s leaders lied to the public, neglected the troops, and did too little to help veterans.

Montalván -- a National Guard officer who had been in uniform for more than a decade -- arrived at Al-Waleed, Iraq, in 2003.  While working to keep arms and insurgents from crossing into Iraq from Syria, Montalván was ambushed and barely escaped assassination.  The severity of his injuries (both physical and psychological) wasn’t immediately recognized -- in part because he refused the requests of medics who wanted him to go to Baghdad for x-rays.  When he returned to Colorado in 2004, the “counseling” he received was brief and ineffective; he feared that requesting more would jeopardize his military career.  Unable to adjust to a quiet life and faced with a failed marriage, he signed up for a second tour in Iraq and was assigned as a liaison officer to the Iraqi Special Forces.  When the Iraqi Army started “a campaign of tribal and ethnic cleaning against the Sunnis” with the tacit support of the American Army, Montalván “could no longer understand what [his] men were fighting and dying for.”  He felt betrayed by leaders who turned their attention to “the media, the message, the public back home -- anything and everything, it seemed, but the soldiers under their command.”  After he wrote a critical op-ed that was published in The New York Times, he received an honorable discharge and returned home with PTSD:  an umbrella diagnosis that encompassed his feelings of anxiety and paranoia, his withdrawal and isolation, his bitter days and sleepless nights.

The final sixteen chapters tell the story I was expecting and that dog lovers will recognize:  a story of training and bonding, loving and learning.  A dog and man with complementary personalities: codependent companions, mutual providers of support.  Although Montalván tells a serious story, he also takes the time to describe Tuesday’s playful antics, wonderful passages that made me laugh out loud.

Even in those chapters, however, the war lurks.  Some politically-minded readers might not appreciate Montalván's take on the Bush administration … or, for that matter, his disappointment with the Obama administration.  Montalván is a bright, emotionally honest man who isn’t afraid to express a forceful point of view; it didn’t bother me but it might anger some, so be warned.  Not all of this book has a "feel good" quality.

Until Tuesday tells a personal story; it isn’t filled with generalized facts about service dogs or PTSD.  I can’t say I learned anything new from it, but that might be because I once helped someone with a social anxiety disorder who can’t leave his home without the calming influence of a service dog.  He was experiencing the same discrimination that Montalván describes:  restaurant managers, worried about violating health codes, mistakenly (and illegally) claim that a dog isn’t really a service dog unless its owner is blind.  I also live next door to a service dog that assists a woman in a wheelchair.  Based on those experiences, and having a golden retriever of my own, I believed every word of Luis Carlos Montalván’s account of how his relationship with Tuesday made it possible for him to reclaim his life -- despite the discrimination he encountered.

Tuesday reminded me so much of my own golden (particularly the description of Tuesday breaking training to dive into a swimming pool to steal the other dogs’ toys) that I have no choice but to recommend this book.  Fortunately, the book merits that recommendation; the story it tells may not be packed with fresh information, but it is memorable and moving and richly rewarding.

RECOMMENDED

Phoenix Rising by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris

Published by Harper Voyager on April 26, 2011

Phoenix Rising is the first in a series of steampunk novels featuring The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences.  I’m not a big follower of the steampunk “movement,” nor do I go out of my way to read this science fiction subgenre, but Phoenix Rising sounded even quirkier than most steampunk so I decided to give it a try.  It turned out to be moderately entertaining but less interesting than I thought it might be.

The novel starts with field agent Eliza Braun rescuing the Ministry’s archivist, Wellington Books, from a cell in Antarctica, where he was being held by the House of Usher.  Braun disobeyed orders by rescuing him; she was supposed to execute him to assure that his knowledge didn’t fall into evil hands.  To punish her transgression, the Ministry’s director, Basil Sound, reassigns her to the archives (an assignment that does not permit her to indulge her passion for dynamite), where she must serve under Books’ tutelage.  When Books tasks Braun with filing unsolved cases, Braun decides it would be more fun to solve them.  In particular, she wants to take on a case that her former partner had been investigating before his admission to an asylum.  She enlists Books’ help and, working on their own (without the Ministry’s knowledge or support), they attempt to infiltrate The Phoenix Society, a secret organization whose members conspire to restore the faded glory of the British Empire.  Their self-assigned mission provides an excuse for the novel’s various fights and chases, as well as constant bickering (and thinly-concealed desire) between Braun and Books.

One of the charms of steampunk is inventive gadgetry; surprisingly little of that turns up in this novel, and the mechanical devices that finally appear are unoriginal.  Much of the novel seems familiar:  from the “difference engine” to serrated blades that extend from carriage wheels, from a secret society bent on world domination to Dickensian street urchins, a fair amount of this novel has been done before.  Even The Phoenix Society’s orgy scene seems like a pale replica of Eyes Wide Shut.  With the exception of that scene and some other references to passionate encounters, the novel resembles an episode of the old British television series The Avengers.

Despite its setting in time and territory, Phoenix Rising is not written in the Victorian prose style that characterizes many steampunk novels.  I imagine some readers prefer reading modern English but it somehow seems untrue to the steampunk mystique.  The novelists’ writing style is adequate to the task but it isn’t exceptional.  I give the writers credit for telling a fun story, one that held my interest, and for creating a couple of winning characters in Eliza Braun and Wellington Books.  The novel’s end sets up the next in the series; I’ll leave it to others to read it.  This one wasn’t bad but it never rose above ordinary.  I would recommend it only to true devotees of steampunk.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey

First published in the UK in 2009; US edition published by Penguin on April 26, 2011

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle tells a story in four parts. The first takes place in 2006. Written in the third person, it introduces the reader to a married couple, George and Sabine Harwood, both age 75. Originally from the UK, they have lived in Trinidad for fifty years. Their maid's son, Talbot, has been beaten by the local police for complaining about an officer's theft of his cell phone. George, a feature writer for a Trinidadian newspaper, resolves to help Talbot. The three parts of the novel that follow are written in the first person from Sabine's perspective. The first begins in 1956 when George and Sabine are fresh off the boat, George having accepted a three year employment contract. Like the European architecture the colonialists have imported to the island, Sabine is "hopelessly at odds with her environment." She resolves to stick it out and soon attains fame as the white woman who rides everywhere on her green bicycle. The novel continues to tell Sabine's story in a section that begins in 1963, when Trinidad is on the verge of independence. The final section takes place in 1970, when dissatisfaction with the island's governance has produced an empowerment movement that expresses itself in violence.

Sabine is a contradictory character. She loves her husband (sometimes) and hates him (sometimes); her animosity toward him oddly increases her passion for him. Sabine is jealous of Trinidad; she fears (probably correctly) that George loves the country more than he loves her. She feels empathy for the plight of Trinidadians living in squalor but at the same time is often frightened of them. She always feels like an outsider, a feeling that is encouraged by Trinidadian resentment of white colonialism. She bonds with her black servants while encouraging them to feel oppressed. Drawn to his political charisma, Sabine begins writing letters to Eric Williams (Trinidad's first prime minister and also a character in the novel) but never mails them (except for the last one, written after her second meeting with him). She writes the letters for company, describing them as "a record of my loneliness and despair." She loves her children (one of whom she sends to boarding school in England) but we read little about them; they don't appear to be a focus of her life. In fact, her life seems to lack focus. As her husband tells her, she's full of complaints. Many of those are justified: George is unfaithful, he drinks too much, and he doesn't consult her before making life-altering decisions. Still, Sabine does little to change her life until the book's last section. She supports political empowerment of Trinidadians but fails to empower herself.

I found the gap between 1970 (when the novel ends) and 2006 (when it begins) to be frustrating; I wanted to know more about what happened in those years so I could better understand the first section. I thought the novel's first section (particularly George's efforts to help Talbot) was its best, yet the story drops Talbot as a character; we never learn what happens to him, making much of the first section seem superfluous. That section is written in a lighthearted tone; once the novel delves into the past it becomes more serious but also less interesting. I admire Monique Roffey's desire to address important questions -- racism, colonial exploitation of the island's resources and inhabitants, ongoing corruption and the failure of political reform after independence -- but we see these issues through Sabine's hazy eyes and her appreciation of them comes across as genuine but superficial.

Roffey's prose is clear but her narrative voice is not distinctive (although she occasionally produces a gem like "This was a nation of sin-loving people who made a point of praying for forgiveness"). On the other hand, her phonetic rendering of the local dialect is masterful; it brings life to the Trinidadian characters. If those characters had been at the novel's heart rather than Sabine, I would likely have enjoyed it more; it's Sabine's story but she's the least interesting character.

As I read The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, my response alternated between mild pleasure and indifference. I didn't dislike the book but I'm not sufficiently enthusiastic about it to give it a strong recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Burning Lake by Brent Ghelfi

Published by Poisoned Pen Press on May 3, 2011

The Burning Lake is the fourth in Brent Ghelfi's series of novels featuring Volk, a Russian colonel who dabbles in crime when he isn't doing assignments for "the General" or engaging in personal quests for revenge (which is one of his primary occupations). Revenge drives the plot of The Burning Lake, as Volk investigates the death of a journalist (and former lover) named Kato. Her body is found buried with those of some missing students near the site of a Russian nuclear weapons design facility. It quickly becomes evident that someone killed Kato to prevent a story from breaking. Volk's efforts to track down the story (and thus Kato's killer) take him to Las Vegas (where he reunites with Brock Matthews, a CIA agent who has appeared in each of the previous novels) and to Tijuana, where he meets a former intelligence officer named Stone who now runs a private security firm.

Ghelfi's first Volk novel (Volk's Game) remains my favorite, followed closely by the third (The Venona Cable). The Burning Lake is more tightly plotted than the second novel (Shadow of the Wolf) but fails to develop Volk's character as fully as the first three. In each novel, Volk is filled with internal anguish.  In the first two particularly, Volk questions the beliefs that drove his rather ugly past; in the third, he questions his father's loyalty to Russia. I was disappointed that the storyline in The Burning Lake is more conventional. We still see some of Volk's inner turmoil but the focus is almost entirely on external events rather than Volk's ongoing struggle to confront his past and change his present. Volk does find himself regretting actions that further harmed his troubled relationship with his girlfriend, Valya, but that storyline was less interesting than Volk's remorse over his role in the suppression of Chechen dissent (a primary focus of the first two novels).

Still, the engaging, action-filled story unfolds at a swift pace, the point of view rapidly shifting between Volk and Stone. There is considerably less of the violence and brutality that characterized the first two novels, but no Volk novel would be complete without a certain amount of bloodshed. This novel works well as a stand-alone; Ghelfi presents enough information about Volk's past to help the reader understand his history without slowing the pace with needless exposition. While The Burning Lake isn't my favorite Volk novel (and, in fact, is probably my least favorite), I enjoyed breezing through it. I recommend it to Volk fans and I recommend the series to thriller readers. If you want to understand what makes Volk such an intriguing character, however, it's best to start at the beginning and read them all.

RECOMMENDED

Theories of Flight by Simon Morden

Published by Orbit on April 26, 2011

Samuil Petrovich, the unlikely hero of Equations of Life, begins this novel by creating artificial gravity.  At some point between Equations of Life and Theories of Flight, Petrovich married Madeleine who, when we last saw her, was a gun-toting nun.  Madeleine apparently had a crisis of faith; she’s now a gun-toting sergeant in the militia that is guarding the Metrozone from Outzone intruders -- including, evidently, Madeleine’s own mother, who shoots Madeleine early on in the novel.  Other key players who survived Equations (including Marchenkho, Sonja, and Chain) return in this one, although in lesser roles, and a couple of interesting new characters are introduced.  The New Machine Jihad is also back, albeit in a somewhat different form.  The plot involves Petrovich’s more-or-less single-handed effort to prevent the “Outies” from invading the Metrozone.

Theories of Flight fleshes out the post-Armageddon world of Simon Morden’s creation.  The Metrozone (what’s left of London, also called the Inzone) is shrinking; its residents are in danger of losing their relatively privileged lifestyles to the uncouth Outies who seek a share of the pie, or perhaps just want to stomp on the pie (sounds like class warfare, doesn’t it?).  The Outzone is expanding, encroaching on the Inzone; the Outies have devolved during the two decades since Armageddon, losing their culture and their language skills.  Across the Atlantic, in Reconstruction America, cultural conservatism prevails:  “you can’t book even a twin room without a copy of your marriage certificate.”  (I’ve gotten used to the ever-so-sophisticated British portraying us Yanks as a bunch of hicks, and perhaps we deserve it, but the notion that Armageddon will cause Americans to forego premarital pleasure seems a bit farfetched.)  Speaking of America's demons, let’s not forget the CIA, which in Morden’s future is still playing dirty tricks on the rest of the world.

In some respects the second novel is better than the first; in others it is not as good.  I like that Morden seemed to be taking the story a bit more seriously; Theories of Flight isn’t as outlandishly tongue-in-cheek as the first novel (losing the fighting nun concept was, I think, a good move).  On the other hand, Theories seems less focused, less driven, than Equations.  There’s a lot going on in Equations (perhaps a bit too much), while an extended section of Theories feels like the literary equivalent of a movie chase scene -- or perhaps an intelligent version of the movie 300.  It isn’t boring; on the other hand, it doesn’t keep the brain buzzing like Equations did. 

A second complaint is that the AI advising Petrovich is intent on debating Petrovich’s love life with him (does he love Madeleine or doesn’t he?) -- an ongoing conversation that just doesn’t work.  A third is that Madeleine's near-fatal encounter with her mother seems like a significant plot point, but it isn't developed.  Maybe Morden will tell us the rest of the story in the next book.  Finally, while I like Petrovich’s opinionated, sarcastic, antagonistic nature, there were times when the action came to a halt so that he could deliver one of his passionate lectures.  Inspiring as they may be, a bit less of that would have helped the story maintain its momentum.

The concluding chapters wrap up the main story nicely but the short last chapter is an information dump.  The world undergoes dramatic change in this novel.  I hope the next one gives us a closer look at the messy political situation Petrovich manages to create.

If you enjoyed Equations, I think you'll like Theories, even if it lacks some of the first novel's virtues.  Theories starts well, the middle is action-filled but light on substance, and the ending carries enough promise that I'm looking forward to reading the trilogy’s conclusion.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS