Satori by Don Winslow

Published by Grand Central Publishing on March 7, 2011

At one point in Satori, the word satori is defined as "to see things as they really are." It's easy to see the novel for what it really is: an old school thriller. It isn't sophisticated or terribly imaginative, but its throwback plot is fun. Satori begins in 1951 with the release of Nicholai Hel (the protagonist in Trevanian's Shibumi) from American custody in Japan. Hel is given a new face, a new identity, and an assignment: to assassinate Yuri Voroshenin, the Soviet commissioner to China. In preparation, Hel is coached in the accent of southern France by the lovely Solange. The first half of the novel follows Hel into China as he pursues his mission. The second half takes him through Southeast Asia and into Saigon where, dodging foreign and domestic killers, he becomes entangled with the mysterious Operation X. Along the way, Hel manages to take on the Russians, the Chinese, the French, the Viet Minh, the Mafia, a Vietnamese crime organization, the Vietnamese emperor, and an assassin known as the Cobra.

Although I liked Satori, several things troubled me about the novel. The characters are caricatures: Voroshenin and the head of the Chinese secret police are cartoonish sadists while Nicholai Hel is the most honorable assassin ever envisioned. Every character in this novel has a story and every story is a cliché: the woman who spies for the French Resistance by selling her body to German soldiers; the woman who gives her body to a Russian officer to save her home from confiscation; the Russian and Chinese officers who torture for pleasure; the intelligence officers waging turf wars; the intelligence officer working for his own (rather than his government's) purposes; the journalist/informant who is a slave to gluttony -- all are familiar characters. The plot depends upon Voroshenin coming to a conclusion that is unsupported by evidence, logic, or the reasonable exercise of intuition. The discussion of Zen philosophy is cheesy. Every now and then the story is slowed by a dull lecture about the evils of communism. The fight scenes are too similar to each other and there must be a half dozen occasions on which Hel is saved from harm by his "proximity sense" (something he apparently borrowed from Spiderman). The women in this novel who aren't selling their bodies to men are being tortured or abused. As I said: old school.

If the novel is so flawed, why was I unable to tear myself away from it? The answer, I suppose, is that Winslow pushed all the right buttons. The story is like comfort food: predictable but tasty. The plot may be formulaic, but it's a good formula: a story in which betrayal is everywhere, challenging both Hel and the reader "to see things as they really are." When the novel turns to action (which is fairly often), the pace is relentless. The ending, while contrived, contains a satisfying twist. Fans of old school thriller writers like Forsyth and Trevanian should like Satori, even if the novel doesn't quite reach the standards set by those writers. 

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Abbott Awaits by Chris Bachelder

Published by Louisiana State University Press on March 1, 2011

Abbott Awaits is a snapshot of Abbott's life at thirty-seven, a three month record of his wonderfully scattered thoughts about marriage and parenthood, neighbors and home repairs, freedom and constraint. Abbott feels entrapped by "his small beseeching world," by "the broken hinge, the moldy tub, the dog who has to pee." It's difficult to tell whether his marriage is troubled or typical. His experiences often make him despondent, yet he's moved by motorists who cooperate with each other when the traffic light fails. Believing that children need stability, he wonders whether he should consistently appear sullen and unresponsive to his daughter at breakfast despite her preference for the few mornings when he manages to be interactive and entertaining. Abbott thinks he has a responsibility to enjoy life, an obligation to delight in his existence, but he's distracted in his effort to do so by a branch leaning on a power line. Sometimes the only thing Abbott wants "is to be knocked unconscious by the long wooden handle of a lawn tool." On the other hand, watching his two-year-old daughter take in the passing world through a car window with wonder and amazement makes Abbott feel that he, like his daughter, is "living fully and directly." In short, Abbott is a complex individual in the very ways we are all complex. I suspect many readers will recognize a bit of themselves in Abbott; I certainly did.

Although quite different in style and subject matter, there's an eccentricity and playfulness to Chris Bachelder's storytelling that reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut. Other comparisons also come to mind. Like Seinfeld, Bachelder chronicles the mundane and makes it funny. Like Woody Allen, Bachelder finds the humor in a character who is preoccupied with human suffering and with the possibility of his own death (particularly while cleaning the gutters). Yet Bachelder writes in a voice that is all his own, sometimes whimsical, often evocative, always precise. This is a writer who knows what he wants to say. And if what he has to say isn't always profound, it's nearly always amusing and often thought-provoking.

Readers who dislike fiction that isn't plot-driven should avoid Abbott Awaits. There is no plot to speak of; the novel is written as a series of introspective vignettes addressing seemingly random events in Abbott's life or thoughts in his head: his reaction to something he has seen on television or read in the newspaper; his interaction with his wife and daughter; his chores, his health, his fears, his neurotic dog ... in short, his life, reduced to bite-sized morsels. Some of the vignettes are quite funny, some are insightful, a few seem a little pointless, but they sum up to a greater whole, a life defined by the small things that comprise it. I enjoyed reading about Abbott and wondering how his life will turn out. Maybe ten years from now Bachelder will give us another glimpse of Abbott's life. If so, I'll read it. 

 RECOMMENDED

The South Lawn Plot by Ray O'Hanlon

Published by GemmaMedia on March 11, 2011

As I began reading The South Lawn Plot, I thought: Not another thriller involving hidden Vatican secrets! It is and it isn't. The plotting of the priesthood underlies the story but many other storylines are layered on top of it. The South Lawn Plot has elements of a spy novel, a mystery, a political drama, and an historical thriller with a bit of romance thrown in for flavor. Ray O'Hanlon juggles so many storylines that keeping track of them all is a dizzying experience.

The primary storyline starts with two dead priests: one hanging from a bridge, the other fallen from a cliff. London tabloid reporter Nick Bailey doesn't think the deaths are a coincidence -- not when the hanging is so similar to Roberto Calvino's, who apparently killed himself in 1982 after his bank became known for its murky dealings with the Vatican. When an archbishop joins the priests in death, Bailey suspects he's chasing a story that could yield the biggest scoop of his career.

Alternating with Bailey's story is John Falsham's conspiracy in the early 1600's to force England to ally itself with Spain and the Catholic Church, a continuation of the plot to kill King James that led to Guy Fawkes' execution. Mixed in with (and eventually dwarfing) those two stories is an apparent assassination plot that targets two political figures from both sides of the Atlantic. Providing the backdrop for the modern day story are bank robbing freedom fighters in Ireland and a potential military conflict between China and Taiwan that might draw the world into a nuclear war.

That should be enough for three novels but Ray O'Hanlon manages to bring the disparate stories together with reasonable success. It might all be an illusion; I'm still puzzling over how (and whether) it all fits together. If it all makes sense, it does so just barely, but thrillers don't need to make perfect sense as long as they thrill, and O'Hanlon delivers plenty of intrigue and some nice action scenes. More importantly, the quality of O'Hanlon's prose is above par for the genre, making the novel a joy to read. His beautifully descriptive writing has true literary flair, and his main characters have well-developed personalities.

Characters are, however, the novel's greatest problem. There are just too many of them. There are dozens of characters in this book, ranging from ambassadors to priests, from secret service agents to industrialists, from a king to an African rebel leader. More than three-quarters of the way through the story, new characters continue to be introduced. In fact, a significant actor makes his first appearance in one of the final chapters. It's all a bit too much; the pace begins to drag in the middle chapters and while the novel is never boring, the loss of energy attributable to the growing multitude of characters is noticeable.

Finally, the ending is clever but not as explosive as the set-up seemed to promise. The outcome doesn't seem like quite the big deal that the book makes it out to be, but that might be due to my American perspective which is relatively indifferent to British royalty. There's also too much "here's what happened" exposition at the end, in contrast to the livelier writing that characterizes the novel's earlier chapters. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading The South Lawn Plot despite its flaws.

RECOMMENDED

Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 1, 2011

I give this unusual, meandering novel credit: I had no idea where it was going yet it held my interest throughout its circuitous journey. More than that, it made me think. What starts as a story about a wealthy rogue at the end of the Nineteenth Century segues into a World War II-era story about a young man who invigorates a prep school football team before he begins collegiate life and pursues an interest in sculpture. The story takes seamless detours into tales of small town violence (a vicious assault upon a female student) and big city violence (a mugging on Chicago's South Side) while exploring questions of perspective and memory. Tying together the stories of the rogue and the intellectual are a boarding school, a cathouse, and a bust sculpted by Rodin.

Rodin's Debutante focuses on two characters. Tommy Ogden, the son of a wealthy railroad baron, has no need to work and so indulges his passions: hunting, sketching, and sleeping with the women provided by the "social club" that leases him a space for his engagements. To the dismay of his wife, Ogden converts their estate into a boarding school for boys who can't fit in elsewhere. The bulk of the novel follows Lee Goodell, the son of a small town judge, who attends Ogden Hall before pursuing an intellectual and artistic life at the University of Chicago and in Chicago's Hyde Park. Like Rodin, Goodell becomes a sculptor. Two episodes of violence are central to the story: the vicious assault of a girl who is Goodell's classmate before he attends Ogden Hall and Goodell's own mugging years later. The two attacks have very different consequences for the two lives ... and that, I think, is one of the novel's points: you never know how your life will turn out. You may or may not be able to shape your future; you may or may not be able to remember your past -- and you may or may not want to do either one.

Although most of the novel is narrated in the third person, Goodell tells his story in the first person in a couple of segments, a jarring shift in point of view that at first puzzled me. This may have been one more way for Ward Just to illustrate the importance of perspective, an issue that lies at the novel's heart. Sometimes perspectives differ and the truth of the matter is hard to know: A headmaster believes that people learn only from their defeats, while Ogden thinks that defeat teaches nothing: it "stays with you and becomes the expected thing."

The differing perspective of urban and rural America is one of the novel's most intriguing themes (small town America, according to one of the novel's voices, provides the country with armies while urban America provides governance) but the larger theme is how people view similar events in different ways, and how the truth, whatever it might be, often remains concealed -- just as the hidden interior of a sculpted stone may never be entirely revealed. At the same time, some perspectives in the novel parallel each other, leading to the same result for different reasons: the small town leaders don't want to publicize the assault of the school girl while residents of the South Side Chicago neighborhood want to keep a lid on Goodell's mugging. In each case, the community believes that airing the truth will lead to harm (the loss of a sense of communal safety in the small town, retributive police action in Chicago). From their perspectives, it is the community that stands to suffer the greatest harm from the crime, not the victim. Of course, the victims see it much differently.

While these ideas make the novel well worth reading and thinking about, the book might not appeal to readers looking for a conventional plot-driven story. Ward Just tells the story in a nonlinear style, resulting in the meandering feeling I mentioned; events trigger memories of other events, stories beget more stories. That didn't bother me but I suspect some readers will be put off by it. A more significant criticism to me is the novel's tone. I rarely felt an emotional connection, either positive or negative, to the characters. I don't necessarily need to like the characters to enjoy a novel, but I want the novel to make me feel something, and about all I felt while reading Rodin's Debutante was curiosity about what might happen next and admiration for Just's writing style. There's little dramatic tension; conflict, when it comes, is usually low key, often described in a voice so detached as to drain it of vitality. A couple of scenes involving Lee and a mugger and one involving Lee and the assault victim are exceptions, as is a wonderfully written scene in which young Lee overhears his father meeting with town leaders in the aftermath of the girl's assault. If the novel had reached that level of intensity more often, I would give it five stars and recommend it highly. I recommend it nonetheless, but for different reasons: the sureness of the writing style and the ideas it explores.

RECOMMENDED

Public Anatomy by A. Scott Pearson

 

Published by Oceanview on March 7, 2011

The word I would use to describe Public Anatomy is: fun. It takes an amusing, irreverent look at medicine and doctors while delivering an absorbing, fast moving story. Primary characters have engaging personalities while minor characters are summed up in two or three sharp sentences that bring them to life. That's a talent I wish more thriller writers would develop.

Public Anatomy opens with a robotic hysterectomy -- robotic in the sense that the surgeon, Dr. Liza French, controls robotic instruments from a remote station. The operation is webcast in what amounts to an extended commercial for the hospital, a potentially lucrative advertisement until a mishap covers the video camera in the unfortunate patient's blood. Dr. French blames the machinery for the patient's death -- the second time she's done so. The novel's starring role, however, goes not to Dr. French but to Dr. Eli Branch, who was apparently featured in A. Scott Pearson's last novel, Rupture (which I have not read). Rather improbably, the FBI recruits him (more or less against his will) to look into the botched robotic surgeries -- a job that is complicated by the relationship that Branch had with French when they worked together as interns.

Meanwhile, murder victims are turning up in the city. A foot bone has been removed from one, a tongue from the next, and the pattern continues in subsequent killings. The killer is dubbed "The Organist." Branch gets pulled into that investigation as well, this time working with a Memphis police detective. Initially, it appears that the connection between the Organist's victims should be obvious to any cop doing even a minimal investigation, but Pearson employs some clever misdirection; the link is less clear than it seems. The relationship between the murders and the surgical deaths is more puzzling and the resolution was unexpected: I didn't see it coming.

Every now and then, Pearson tosses in a very funny scene: Branch flushing maggots from a patient's head with a WaterPik; police officers sharing a moment of silence in mutual respect for Kojak. Much of the novel has a lighthearted tone. Some readers might think that tone is inappropriate for a thriller, but I thought it worked. Pearson doesn't inundate the reader with medical jargon but he doesn't dumb down the narrative either. The middle of the novel includes a mercifully brief lesson in the history of anatomy and a mini-biography of a Sixteenth Century anatomist. Pearson made those subjects sufficiently interesting to hold my attention. In the midst of all this Pearson makes a significant point about how modern medicine has shifted from a hands-on approach that maximized interaction with the patient to a technological (even robotic) approach that detaches the practitioner from the patient.

So the novel worked for me, but it isn't perfect. Pearson is better at medical drama than police procedure. The detective gives Branch a critical piece of evidence without logging it into evidence or placing it into an evidence bag, a breach of protocol that would risk the loss of a real world detective's job. The FBI's use of coercion to enlist Branch's assistance is perfectly credible but its desire for Branch's help isn't. Nor does it make sense that the FBI would investigate the death of French's patients. Even if the agents had reason to suspect that the deaths were due to anything beyond negligence, it's difficult to see what federal crime they were investigating (as opposed to their investigation of corruption in the biotechnology industry, which is more in line with what the FBI actually does). The implications of robotic technology that might malfunction seems like one of the book's driving themes until it's inexplicably dropped in favor of other storylines. Since these flaws don't detract significantly from the story, however, I recommend Public Anatomy to readers looking for a fun, lighthearted medical thriller.

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