Zoom book club recommends...

 

寧為太平犬，不做亂世人">寧為太平犬，不做亂世人

A slightly late Happy New Year to everybody out there in Blogland. How are we all enjoying living in those interesting times the Chinese (allegedly) warned us about?

Like most people, I've spent most of the past year doing whatever it takes to get me through the day. Like reading books, then meeting up with friends to talk about them ... only with an extra helping of everybody being on the other end of a Zoom call and a side order of silently screaming "You're on mute!" Happy days.

Apart from the social interaction, however degraded by Zoom fatigue, reading groups have two great features. They introduce you to books you wouldn't otherwise have read, and reading a more diverse selection of books means that some of those books will fulfill what those old Heineken adverts used to promise, and refresh the parts other books cannot reach.

Our last two books were good examples. Both fiction, but each one refreshing completely different parts:

Exhibit A: Fifty-Fifty by Steve Cavanagh.

Exhibit B: Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler.

No significant spoilers ahead.

On different levels, I enjoyed both books, although they're chalk and cheese. Of course, opinions differed, but I'm not here to debate whether any specific book was "good" or "bad." I am here to say that your reading diet, like your actual diet, is healthier if it's varied. 

Fifty-Fifty is a plot-driven courtroom drama and thriller, which kicks off with the discovery that a colourful Italian-American former mayor of New York has been brutally murdered in his own home.

Yikes! Be careful, Rudy!

The central mystery is that, when the ex-mayor was murdered, the only other two people in the house were his grown-up offspring, Alexandra and Sofia Giuliani Avellino. In this whodunnit, each sister accuses the other one of the murder and there seems to be no conclusive evidence to show which one of them actually did it (or, for that matter, whether the two sisters conspired together to do their old man in).

Enter hard-boiled criminal lawyer Eddie Flynn, defending the sister who, his gut instinct tells him, is the innocent party. Is Eddie's instinct right? Expect the classic whodunnit menu of red herrings, the killer(s) covering her/their tracks with acts of ruthless brutality and twisted ingenuity, unexpected plot twists and startling revelations.

Fifty-Fifty is your classic airport thriller done well (in my opinion). The part of me it reached was the part that wants straightforward entertainment, puzzles and distraction. It's not going to change me on a fundamental level. Now that I've read it and know how the mystery gets solved, I've no particular desire to re-read it, but it passed the time pleasantly enough.

But it does what it does pretty well. It's easy to dismiss this sort of genre writing, especially when, like Fifty-Fifty, the book gets singled out as a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick of the week, the literary equivalent of getting kissed by your mum at the school gates and for ever blowing your chances of hanging out with the cool kids.

But, literary snobbery aside, think about these facts. It's easy to write. Almost all of us leaned that stuff at school. But it's hard to write well enough that people want to read what you've written, and carry on reading it for several hundred pages. Even if you have this talent, it requires a pretty special blend of talent, determination and luck to actually get published. Most books which make it into print don't sell that well. Fifty-Fifty did pretty well and, although it reads well enough as a stand-alone novel, it's only one of a series of books that Steve Cavanagh's written about the reformed con artist turned criminal lawyer Eddie Flynn, showing that the guy's not just a flukeish one-hit wonder.

But it's also a work of genre, which stands at a remove from the real world. It contains several tropes of the crime genre. Eddie Flynn, for example, is an instantly recognisable type - the dogged, incorruptible, rebellious, maverick outsider hero with a troubled personal life. The same goes for what he's up against - out there, there's a devilish plot, an elaborate game being played against law enforcement and natural justice, planned by a brilliant, but warped, mind (or minds - you'll have to read to the end to find out which). We've been here before, from the evil schemes of Professor Moriarty and Hannibal Lecter, to the elaborate mind games of a TV series like The Bridge. 

Now I'm no expert on crimes and solving crimes,* but I'm pretty sure that, in real life, this isn't generally how it works. From what I gather, solving crimes is a team effort and most stuff gets solved by following established, tested procedures, at least in functioning systems of law enforcement. Where there's systemic corruption, incompetence, or even just institutional groupthink, some team members need to stand up and go against the flow but, in real life, I don't think most crimes end up being solved by some Eddie Flynn or Philip Marlowe type going rogue and kicking doors open.

As for violent crimes, yes, in a lot of real-life cases the victim and perpetrator are known to one another, so that's like the crime scene in Fifty-Fifty. But that's where the similarity ends; in real life, these sorts of crimes are mostly unplanned or poorly-planned and easy to solve. Even in those very rare cases of ruthless, high-functioning game-playing killers who plan and carry out their crimes methodically, the offenders rarely turn out to be warped geniuses of the crime fiction trope, but exceptions who fall through the cracks due at least partly to luck, or to an outbreak of the groupthink. incompetence or corruption I've already alluded to on the part of the authorities.

Although the rules of the genre are not the same as the rules of real life, Fifty-Fifty does a pretty decent job within the conventions and limits of the genre. Most of what happens is internally consistent and believable within the world of the book. The police and court procedure stuff sounded convincing and well-researched to me and, though it was a work of genre fiction it also touched on real-world social issues from unequal access to justice for rich and poor, to sexism, which gave it more of a feeling of heft and believability than many less accomplished crime novels.

Redhead by the Side of the Road is a different kind of novel altogether. From the opening, I had a sinking feeling that this book wasn't going to be a barrel of laughs:

"You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer. He lives alone; he keeps himself to himself; his routine is etched in stone."

Sure enough, it turns out that Micah is a self-employed tech guy, living the proverbial life of quiet desperation, just about getting by with very few limited and unsatisfactory relationships with his fellow humans, scraping just enough of a living to afford a rented apartment which he keeps spotless with an unvarying cleaning routine. In his rented box, Micah writes notes to the other residents of his block, complaining about their persistent failure to flatten their cardboard packaging when the recycling goes out on bin days. 

At this point, I cheered myself up by checking the page count. Only 178 pages? Phew! At least it looked like I wouldn't be spending too much of my down time with Micah and his rather bleak little life.

So I stuck with it, and was very surprised at how much I ended up enjoying this book. Unlike the event-packed Fifty-Fifty, nothing much happens for most of the book. Only once does something fairly major, dramatic and unexpected happen to Micah, But what does happen turns out to be surprisingly compelling.

Unlike Fifty-Fifty, the entertainment here isn't straightforward. There's lots of everyday miscommunication and conflicts, especially between orderly, routine ways of living and messy, spontaneous lives, observed in a way that can be simultaneously sad and hilarious (there are points where both you're seriously willing Micah not to innocently say that wildly inappropriate thing he's about to say to his semi-detached girlfriend and can't help finding it funny at the same time).

There are puzzles here, too but, again, they're not the slightly detached clear-cut "It was Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the billiard room" puzzles of the whodunnit but as messy, ambiguous and often unresolved as the ones from everyday life.

As for distraction, there doesn't seem to be a lot of it. Except that, by a chapter or so in, there is. It's just a change of mental gears from Fifty-Fifty, slowing down and seeing the universe of small detail you miss when you're speeding, pedal to the metal, through the big, noisy world of the plot-driven thriller. 

That's a wonderful thing about books. They're fractal - you can zoom in or out to any scale and still be drawn into a dense, engaging landscape where you can uttely lose yourself. 

I don't think I've done justice to how well-written and unexpectedly absorbing Redhead By The Side of the Road is, but just take my word for it and give it a go. After all, what have you got to lose? It's only 178 pages and, if you're stuck in lockdown while the world around you burns, you might as well try something new.

Anyway, as the omnishambles that was 2020 lurches into the existential horror show of 2021, have a good one and stay safe, everybody. I don't know about you, but after a weird and terrible year, I'm starting to feel a bit more chipper about life. There are obvious reasons to be more cheerful (we have vaccines, alleluia!), but I'm sensing another sort of shift. 

Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting a feeling that we're pretty damn close to rock bottom and the only way is up.  The abject failure of the Trump putsch only heightened a sense that a toxic boil is bursting and change is coming. It feels like a time for reflection, a time to take stock. So, after sharing a couple of literary discoveries from the last year, I'd like to close by sharing my piece of music of the year which, I think, perfectly captures the zeitgeist.

It's not celebratory, in fact it's downright mournful. But it's also spine-tinglingly powerful, beautiful and utterly appropriate. Ladies and gentlemen, sit back and enjoy the legend that is Annie Lennox and the socially distanced London Voices Choir, totally smashing it with this awesome rendition of Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas:

"We have always been surrounded by terror and by the beauty that is an inseparable part of it."

The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecký.

 

 

*If you are, examples, corrections and clarifications are welcome in the comments (comments moderated by me, but I'm happy to publish any reasonable feedback).