Archive for the ‘Book Lust Book’ Category
>Morituri
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Yasmina Khadra (real name: Mohammed Moulessehoul) is a former high ranking Algerian army officer who moved to France in 2000 after having witnessed some of the bloodiest and most brutal days in Algerian history (and that is saying a lot). Moulessehoul went into exile because he dared write about the fact that there were few “good guys” in the Algeria’s religion-based civil war, other than perhaps the countless civilians who were slaughtered in the process. The Algerian army was often as guilty of atrocity as the terrorists whom the military struggled to control.
That Khadra/Moulessehoul would leave Algeria with a jaded outlook on life is no surprise. That he would adapt his experiences into a classically noirish detective series would be more difficult to imagine – but that is exactly what he did with Morituri and the other Superintendent Llob books.
Superintendent Llob and Lieutenant Lino have been around long enough to understand the politics of police work in a city as politically corrupt as Algiers. They recognize the relationship between corrupt politicians, businessmen, and high ranking police officials. But those simple days are over. Now, policemen like Llob and Lino are being targeted for political assassination by groups trying to collapse Algeria’s governmental system. In order to speed up the cultural breakdown, policemen and their families are being assassinated alongside writers, singers, journalists, entertainers, and others deemed to be a threat to the Muslim revolution. Men like Llob and Lino take each day one at a time, thankful each time they make it to the office without incident.
In the midst of the turmoil, Superintendent Llob is assigned to search for the missing daughter of one of the more corrupt powerbrokers in Algiers. The search will force Llob and Lieutenant Lino into the underworld of Algiers that few Westerners would dream exists. Llob, ever the tough guy, uses his contacts to get himself inside some of the most decadent settings one can imagine, places where anything and everything can be had for the right price, including young women, little girls, and little boys. Llob pursues the search for the missing rich girl, crashing and bullying his way from scene to scene, despite what he learns about her and her father.
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| Yasmina Khadra |
The strength of Morituri is in how the novel so deftly captures the atmosphere of 1990s Algiers, a city in which paranoia and fear ruled the day. When I left Algiers in late 1993 (early in the evolution of the war), it was already a city of curfews, unreliable roadblocks, massacres of entire villages, beheadings, kidnappings, bombs, and assassinations. Drivers had to decide on a hunch whether a roadblock was being manned by real military personnel or by terrorists dressed to look the part. There was a shoot-on-sight rule for anyone caught on the streets after ten p.m. Villages, down to the last man, woman and child, were slaughtered within the sight and hearing of army posts but military personnel did not always bother to notice. Westerners were targets of choice for kidnappers and assassins. Army and police personnel seldom bothered to take prisoners in shootouts with terrorists they confronted in the middle of a long Algerian night.
The difference was I could walk away from Algiers, never to return. Superintendent Llob and Lieutenant Lino had to stay and to do their best to protect the streets of the city, an impossible task. Yasmina Khadra has written Morituri in a style that can be a bit difficult to read at times – characters come and go at a rapid pace and the plot veers from scene to scene like a runaway train – but he has done a magnificent job in recreating the atmosphere of a major world city that was eating itself alive in the nineties.
Rated at: 4.0
>Abandoned: The 8:55 to Baghdad
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I’ve decided this year that, when it comes to “abandoned” books, I want to do more than just keep track of the number of them I encounter. After all, abandoned books are, in their own way, just as remarkable as books that I absolutely love – they are just at the other extreme end of the rating scale. These are books that even fail to allow me to turn their pages without almost groaning out loud from the effort.
That does not mean, of course, that they are necessarily “bad” books. It simply means that after giving them a fair shot, I see going on with them as being a colossal waste of my time. It reflects my personal reaction to these books. Others may very well love them; see the next paragraph for proof of that.
This brings me to my experience this weekend with The 8:55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames. This is another book I discovered through Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust to Go and is the first of hers to which I’ve reacted negatively.
The premise of The 8:55 to Baghdad is that its author will recreate Agatha Christie’s 1928 train trip from London to Baghdad, the trip that spawned her famous Murder on the Orient Express. The book’s subtitle, From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie, tells readers what to expect. As Eames remarks early in the book, making this trip in 2002 is much more difficult, and potentially much more dangerous, than the trip that Christie took. World War II and other recent conflicts in Europe have redrawn some borders and made them more difficult to cross, and the political unrest and actual fighting in the Middle East was, in 2002, getting worse by the month.
I have read and enjoyed several train-trip books in the past and expected that this one would be a treat, filled with interesting fellow passengers of the author’s and lots of colorful stories about the stops he made along the way. That might very well prove to be the case – eventually – but after slogging through 60 pages of some of the more tedious prose I’ve read in a while, I will never know. I simply cannot take another page of lifeless characters and writing so dry that I can barely concentrate on two consecutive sentences long enough to get their meaning.
The 8:55 to Baghdad is definitely not for me and I am stamping it as officially abandoned.
>Territory
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Territory broke new ground for me. I have long been a fan of realistic western fiction, the grittier the better, but have never much enjoyed fantasy writing of the type filled with magicians, superheroes, or magic kingdoms. Fortunately, this time my love for both factual and fictional accounts of the Earp brothers, and their association with Doc Holliday, overrode my reluctance to spend reading time on the fantasy genre. That is because Emma Bull has pulled off what I would have considered impossible before reading Territory: a near perfect blending of a realistic western with a healthy dose of magic thrown into the mix.
That Bull’s use of magic is key to the development of her novel’s plot and characters but still not overdone, makes for an enjoyably off-center look at some real-life characters already very familiar to fans of Old West novels. The action all takes place in and around Tombstone, Arizona, just a few months before the infamous (and still mysterious) “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” as all the usual suspects gather there to feed on the hatred they feel for each other.
On the one side are Wyatt Earp, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and the equally famous dentist who calls himself Doc Holliday. On the other side are gunslinger Johnny Ringo and the Clanton and McClaury brothers, a bunch of part-time cowboys and rustlers. What makes this portrayal of the historical events of the day so different is that several of the key players have more than simple charisma working in their favor; they are secret magicians with the power to influence events as much with their minds as with their pistols.
Into this mix, Bull blends several fictional characters that get caught up in the events of the day. Jesse Fox, making his way to Mexico where he hopes to make a living breaking wild horses, stops in Tombstone to see his old friend from San Francisco, Chow Lung. Fox knows deep-down that his Chinese friend has unusual powers but is reluctant to admit it even to himself. Little does he know that Chow Lung has called him to Tombstone using some of that same magic so that the two can investigate the evil that has entered the town. Mildred, recently widowed, works in one of Tombstone’s daily newspapers as a typesetter but is the glue that holds the little paper together. When Jesse Fox comes into the office one day, they inadvertently begin a partnership that will change both their lives forever.
Bull takes the time to build a realistic setting within which she develops her characters and their motivations. Atmospherically, everything will seem so familiar to fans of the western genre that, when fantasy replaces realism, they will hardly notice the jolt. Fantasy and magic are well used in order to explore a world on the edge, one in which physical strength and domination are key elements in local politics and in the everyday lives of all of Tombstone’s citizens.
This one is fun, and it would be a shame if those who loathe either western fiction or fantasy fiction were to miss it. Give it a shot.
Rated at: 4.0
>The Broken Shore
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I have long believed that quality crime fiction, the kind built around a sense of place and well developed characters, can give the armchair traveler a better feel for a country and its culture than all but the best written travel books. Books like Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore always remind me how true that is.
Big city Australian cop Joe Cashin has been exiled to the little police station responsible for the security of the small South Australian coastal town he grew up in – not that the citizens there have much crime to worry about. He has ostensibly been sent to the area to recover from a serious physical injury, but Cashin is the kind of cop whose superiors sometimes need a break from him, and no one seems in a hurry to call him back. Perhaps that is because he is not much into political correctness or going out of his way to make his fellow policemen look good when they do not deserve it.
When local millionaire Charles Bourgoyne is discovered in his mansion with his head bashed in, Cashin soon finds himself at odds with others in the department who are determined to pin the crime on a group of aboriginal teens caught trying to sell the man’s watch. After the case is officially closed, Cashin, ever the introspective loner, decides to investigate the crime on his own. His investigation, made more difficult by the town’s instinctive racism toward its aboriginal population, will lead him deep into a part of the community’s past tainted by child pornography and sexual abuse.
Joe Cashin is not a perfect cop. In fact, he sometimes tends to make the kind of careless or lazy mistake that can place him, his fellow cops, or the success of an investigation in danger. The older he gets, the more Cashin questions what he has done with his life. He is close to no one, including his mother and only brother, but despite not being happy about the situation, he does little to remedy it. But the man has a good heart, and a very big one, at that. He is a staunch defender of the underdog and he believes in second chances, two qualities that mark him as a misfit among his fellow policemen.
The Broken Shore is filled with memorable little moments, unforgettable characters, and complicated personal relationships. It is about much more than the murder of one old man with a past of his own to protect. Peter Temple uses dialogue to develop his characters much in the way that Elmore Leonard has become so celebrated for doing. It works well for Temple, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting into the revealing conversational rhythms of his characters. Readers will be well advised, however, to familiarize themselves with the Australian slang terms in the book’s glossary before beginning the novel (a fun, standalone read, that is) in order to keep the conversation flowing at the pace at which it is meant to be read.
This, my first Peter Temple novel, is actually the author’s ninth, and I look forward to reading the others.
Rated at: 4.0
