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Eric Shaw, a talented cinematographer who has more potential than he does discipline to realize it, is unhappy with his life. He feels he deserved and continues to deserve More. The great break could be any day.
Once in demand by Hollywood directors, Eric now makes his living doing memorial videos from photographs, scrap books and other memorabilia collections when someone has died. He takes a pile of memories the deceased left behind and turns them into something that will become a distilled memory of the deceased for the survivors. When he just has a feeling about including a photo of an isolated cottage in one of the memorial videos, he sets off a chain of events that leads him to West Baden, and an encounter with a side of the universe most of us never see.
The place setting that infuses the story, sustains and makes it possible is a real piece of American life and history, the mineral bath spas of French Lick and West Baden Indiana. The resort at West Baden has been restored in real life as well as in the fictional world of So Cold the River. Koryta does an excellent job of conveying the impressive structure’s beauty, as well as the feel of the surrounding countryside. The dome above the lobby area was the largest in the world until 1913, and in the US until 1955 when a larger (but far less beautiful) domed coliseum was built in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Equally real is the Lost River, and the unique mineral springs that can be found throughout the area.
So Cold the River is not a travelogue or a local history, but without the unique geography and the local history anyone would have been hard pressed to imagine such a place, and Koryta brings it to life.
Besides creating a living, breathing setting in which the story takes place, this book brings vivid characters that are human, and some who used to be. Which begs the question, do we cease being human just because we’ve left the body behind?
Josiah Bradford, a young man who is the last descendant of the infamous Campbell Bradford, now works as a lawn maintenance technician at the restored West Baden resort, not so quietly smouldering with rage over his lowly position in a valley his ancestor Campbell once mostly owned and definitely ran. Josiah has in common with Eric the sense of something owed him, of having been defrauded somehow, of the unspecified glories that should rightfully have been his and unfairly are not. Where Eric has several factors in his life to keep him grounded (including people who both believe and understand his vulnerability to dreams and visions), Josiah does not, and when Campbell himself arises from the dead with colorful determination to use them both, Josiah and Eric are put on a collision course. Campbell Bradford, you see, had been an extremely evil man, and he enjoyed it.
He still does.
Another great character is Anne Bradshaw, a slight elderly woman who brings the story a port of stability in a very strange storm. Anne is a brilliantly written woman, full of years and happy to have lived a full life as ordinary as she herself is aware of the non-ordinary side of the place she lives, occupied now with watching her life wind down, and happy to be of extremely practical use. She’s a voice of reason as well as belief, a quiet kind of hero, a sweet, generous old woman with nerves of steel.
The only characters who are immediately vulnerable to Campbell are Eric and Josiah, because of terms Campbell himself laid out. They also have in common the chip on their shoulder, the resentment, the ego – the Pride, if you will, that makes them vulnerable to Campbell’s manipulation. In Josiah’s case that vulnerability turns him into a tool of revenge in the hands of his ancestor. Standing almost off the page, Campbell Bradford is a palpable presence, looming behind and thrumming through the narrative like the vibrations of the train he rides.
As genre fiction, So Cold the River will not disappoint any reader who just wants a decent, well-written shiver down the spine, or a well-planned and precisely-executed mystery. As literature, it provides interesting peeks into the depths of the human experience, and teaches us about our ties to each other, including how binding those ties can be, even beyond the grave.
Enjoy.
In short: This is not a book for your granny, your adolescent son, or anyone the least bit squeamish, impressionable, or inclined in certain ways. It is an interesting, thought-provoking read for emotionally stable adults, well-written, action-packed, possibly the basis for a new series on the model of the Camel Club set. Only darker.
It’s hard to write about this book. I enjoyed Baldacci’s usual high-standard of writing. I enjoyed his characterization. The intertwining of plotlines is complex and masterfully handled, the timing so tight you have few natural breaks in the momentum to take a break from the story without losing the sense of it. From all those perspectives, it’s a great read, an excellent book from an excellent author.
But there were things I did not enjoy, that left a taste in my metaphorical mouth, and stuff in my head I didn’t want there. Up until now, Baldacci’s books have been free of much in the way of described sexual encounters, and haven’t eroticised violence. They also haven’t been terribly graphic in the description of violence. In Deliver Us from Evil, the sexual detail is mild (and a little awkward) by comparison to most authors, but the descriptions of violence and torture are not, and there is potential for the violence to be erotic for some readers. This is a risk that has to be taken if some issues are going to be addressed in anything resembling a direct fashion. This didn’t give me nightmares, but it has given me a good deal of afterthought, not all of it welcome.
That said, and as I’m not really all that squeamish and nothing in here can match the level of horror contained in The Theory and Practice of Hell by Eugene Kogel (the definitive study of the Nazi death camps; a book that I don’t recommend outside of academic necessity, which is where I encountered it and which did give me nightmares – for years), I do have misgivings about some of the content in Deliver Us from Evil. Besides a slide onto the greasy slope of realistic horror, Deliver Us from Evil has something 
of the roman a clef about it – Individuals and places symbolic of larger modern political issues. You can figure it out if you watch the news. Baldacci is often saying more than he says. Maybe I’m wrong about that, it’s just my opinion, but I’ve always felt Baldacci knows how to load content into the words that make up the story the way a pastry chef puts that delicious cream inside a cannoli. You need the shell to hold it together.
The obvious issue the book explores is torture. I’m confident that the vast majority of us will agree there is a difference between forcing someone to stand on a stool for several days and flaying them alive. The remaining question is whether the two practices belong on the spectrum of what constitutes torture or whether they belong in different categories of thing altogether.
Is waterboarding torture? Sen. John McCain (nobody’s liberal), who has been waterboarded, says it is. He’s also not too big a fan of stress positions, having lost the full use of his arms to stress positions. And we have called him a hero in part for enduring torture – so are these things torture when done by some but when done by others? When someone has unlimited power and no oversight (as was the case with Kuchin in the Ukraine), the darkest fantasies easily find thier way into reality. Forcing someone to stand, kneel, or sit in a stress position for days in order to get information you hope will save lives may be torture, but it’s not the same as flaying someone alive just because you can. But what is the difference? Is the difference one of inherent nature or of degree? Does the reason for the action come into consideration? Should it? Are some things just wrong no matter what?
Does the freedom to do the less horrible lead to the freedom to do the worse thing?
These are questions you will have to answer for yourself.
In Deliver Us from Evil, we are back in the world of Shaw, whom we met before in The Whole Truth and again in First Family. Shaw is big (6 and half feet tall – which beggars the imagination for a person in a line of work where blending in is necessary) and in constant motion; secure enough in his masculinity not to be threatened by a strong female counterpart; and as able to follow as to lead, as long as it’s a good idea or an order. Shaw is capable of violence, but not driven to it, and still grieving Anna.
The primary plot of Deliver Us from Evil revolves around a character (one shudders to call him a man as that requires the realization that there are in fact humans just exactly like this) born Fedir Kuchin, now known as Evan Waller, Canadian businessman. Kuchin’s father was Ukrainian and mother French (from Gordes, where some of the action takes place; in real history, Gordes was an Resistance community, awarded the Crois de guerre as a community for its actions between 1939 and 1945); as an adult member of the KGB Kuchin was responsible directly and indirectly for the deaths of thousands during his work in the Ukraine under the old Soviet regime. Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kuchin reinvented himself as a new sort of blot upon humanity, Canadian businessman Evan Waller, selling hordes of young women into the short-life expectancy of the global sexual slave trade. He lives a life of palatial luxury in absolute anonymity. Yet he yearns for the old days, for being known as someone to fear when he walks down the street, an odd balance to the elaborate measures he takes to isolate himself at an almost Dr. No level of privacy. You can’t just drop by Kuchin’s house for dinner, and there’s no reason a sane person would want to.
Kuchin is the target to two groups, neither of them given names. One is British, private, off-the-shelf, and managing on donations and a little old-fashioned (but effective) in their methods. They began as Nazi hunters and have moved on to target men like Kuchin, for termination with extreme prejudice. This group knows about his re-invention of himself as Waller, and his trafficking of humans for sex slavery, but this isn’t what attracted them – they are after Kuchin as Kuchin, the “real” Butcher of Kiev, not as Waller, faux Canadian flesh-peddler. Getting a major trafficker in humans off the street is gravy, but he did enough in Ukraine to make him a worthy target. Their strike teams are led by various agents, the one we see in action is Reggie, a woman with a dark past of the sort that creates a killer. She’s a good counterbalance for Shaw, but not as completely realized as Annabelle Conroy, from the Camel Club series, but we have gotten to see Annabelle over more than one novel. (Baldacci and Mankell are the only male authors I can think of who are able to write fully credible female characters. )
In a parallel mission, Shaw and his group are after Canadian businessman Evan Waller, and have no idea of his true past. They want him for one thing, and one thing only. Waller has attracted their attention by being involved in a deal to move uranium into dangerous hands. They know Waller is into other nasty business, but their vision is focused like a laser on the one thing and only the one thing.
Naturally, the streams cross.
I’d like to say more, but I don’t want to give away any of the plot, which is especially well-constructed, and full of surprises that actually surprise, from characters who develop yet remain in character. Why spoil it for you?
Having read Lost: A Search for Six among Six Million, Child 44, and Deliver Us from Evil, I would like to see someone intelligently address either in a fictional or non-fictional setting, the effect the Holodomor had on the severity of the Holocaust in the Ukraine. The two are deeply related, and no one that I’m aware of has ever taken a look at this interplay of evil begetting evil. We try to keep the lessons of the Holocaust in front of our eyes, to not forget, so we don’t let it happen again (even though it has). We should take the lesson a step or two further into the past. History is a game of dominoes – nothing ever happened in isoaltion or just because.
I’m not going to go so far as to say that only leCarre could have written this story, although it probably woudn’t have been as good if someone else had.
It would also likely never have seen the light of day. Only someone with leCarre’s stature could get published a book this courageous, this close to the edge of the reality we now find ourselves in but choose to ignore except as entertainment.
As compelling as each and every character is (no matter how little space they take in the narrative), they shouldn’t be seen as purely individual representations. Everyone’s an archetype, some are conscious of it. Tommy Brue, for example, knows himself to be a dinosaur, presiding over the terminal phase of his inheritance, Brue Freres, a Scots bank operating in Hamburg with a French name indicating the existence of brothers who never were; an anachronism in a world that doesn’t know much anymore about ledger books, except in the figurative sense.
Annabelle Richter, who sits upright (as she should) and finds herself having to be certain she doesn’t put a foot wrong from more than one perspective, is a thoroughly modern, highly-educated, self-determining Western woman who nevertheless finds herself swathed in multiple layers of baggy clothes and wears a headscarf to put her client at ease. It takes no time at all for Brue to fall for her.
On the other side, or I should say another side for there are far more than two, sits Gunther Bachmann, an old-fashioned spy-master, expert recruiter and runner of the original on-the-ground human eyes kind of intelligence gathering, now part of an officially non-existent Unit operating under a Joint Committee intended on paper to draw German espionage into a single coherent organization with one boss. The rest of the team is that: Drawn clearly as individuals, they nevertheless act as a team, following orders, blended thoroughly into the new way of doing things, deeply dependent on the kind of technological data gathering that it should scare you “they” can do, and actually do, all the time. Bachmann almost alone understands that data isn’t knowledge, a point he tries repeatedly to make; a Quixotic exercise.
All the to-do flies like a storm around a young man named (not for nothing ) Issa Karpov, the son of a Russian Army General turned criminal and a Chechn mother. Issa is the creature of Russian culture gone awry anda become aware of the devastation wrought my his father not just as a person but as a nation on his mother not just as a person but as an ethnic group, and he has sided with her, with equal amounts of ignorance and passion. All we know of Issa is that he has been tortured, beaten in a Turkish jail for unspecified crimes, that he is broadly considered a terrorist either in fact or in potentialis; he is the eye at the center of the storm. Rather as is the case for his namesake, a lot goes on around him and because of him, but at his heart, Issa himself remains a mystery.
Layer after layer is peeled back to show us the history of the characters (please, this is much smeller than an onion), the way things got to be this way, at least in part, and details accrue like sand on the beach but they mustn’t be ignored.
A Most Wanted Man begins with a pace that is almost laconic, and slowly builds, Issa the still point against which everything else pushes, until the story reaches an ending that will leave you as shattered as the characters.
John leCarre has given us a masterpiece that isn’t merely timely, it is the times in readable form. It’s all there – the anguish of irrevocable change both personal and cultural, visited upon us from outside somewhere, not our choosing; embracing the loss of the past and celebrating the resulting freedom only to find oneself in a new land without a road map; the violent clash not only between cultures but between patriotism and jingoism, promises meant and promises that are lies for what the speaker thinks express loyalty to a greater truth; and on almost every page the deep anguish of discerning the right thing to do no matter which moral lexicon you were raised with, if any.
We live in a world where we are collectively and individually unsure of who we are because we are collectively and individually unsure of where we are, or what. This is what it’s like for those who are so fortunate as to live through one of the hinges of history. This is the situation we are in.
A Most Wanted Man is a keyhole through which we can peep at that situation. That you’ll find it in the fiction section may make the experience a little easier to take.
Check it out:
An Archaeology of Freedom by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
Gumbs is, as you will hear, an original and strong voice, not only in poetry, but for social justice.
Enjoy.
I’m not merely excited about this book, I’m excited about this author. Helen Oyeyemi is a brilliant, original, unique voice in a world of also-rans.
White Is for Witching for me came on the heels of reading two books seminal to the vampire genre, and of course, in a story about vampires, the Biblical phrase “for the life is in the blood” never quite leaves the back of your mind. In White, the main character, Miranda Silver, a sliver of a girl, develops Pica, a disease that causes its victims to crave substances that have no life in them to give – chalk, dirt, plastic spatulas. The taking in of an inanimate bullet closed Lily Silver’s life, cutting a hole in the Silver family that can’t be healed or patched over.
As Miranda Silver, daughter of Lily, consumes things that cannot sustain her, the house around her consumes her, the not-living eating the living, who in turn eats the things with no blood, no life, in them. The myth of the Soucouyant reaches the pages, along with the acknowledgment that if one does not feed one’s own life, move it forward, one must live off the lives of others, like Dracula, like the vampires Buffy slays. (BtVS as background of serious literature.) Trading one’s own future for the consumption of the past of the other, of their potential future.
What has a soul? Can a house have a soul, a spiritual existence? Does the Soucouyant, the vampire? Miri’s craving for inanimate objects, for taking them into herself and reconstituting them into her being represents her desire to not-be. Miri wears her mother’s watch, stopped at the time of her mother’s death, a death caused by violence, and is befuddled when a friend buys her batteries for the watch, energy to feed it, to make time move forward again. Time has stopped, so should she, become fixed, perfect, good.
Miri and her brother Eliot are twins, driven apart first by her disease and secondly by her acceptance to Cambridge, leaving Eliot to (perhaps) go to South Africa. But Miri has other twins, and isn’t quite herself, sitting in her room she calls “the psychomanteum.” A psychomanteum is a place designed to reflect, to contact the world of spirits, to induce an altered state, and Miri is certainly not the girl she was before a bullet tore her mother’s life away in Port au Prince.
At first you get told which character is speaking, then you become so familiar with the different voices you simply know when the narrator has changed. Miranda herself is always described in the third person, as is Luc, father of Miranda and her twin brother Eliot. Luc is a lost man in more ways than one, and Miri, in her silence, remains a mystery.
White Is for Witching is gothic, but not horror. There’s too much crammed into its few pages to call it just one thing. It’s gothic, it’s feminist, it’s romance, it’s current events, it’s the impact of cultures against, within and beside cultures, its totally worthy of your time to read and I can’t wait to see what Oyeyemi does next.
Here are some links:
To the site for the book (UK edition)
To a lovely interview conducted by Bernardine Evaristo, herself an accompmlished author.
“If competition, the ‘free market’, the sum of little pleasures, and the walls that protect you from the desire of the weak, are the alpha and omega of all collective and private existence, then the human animal is not worth a cent.”
Alain Badiou is a leftist philosopher, whose work you should read perhaps especially if you anticipate disagreeing with his conclusions.
The book, The Meaning of Sarkozy, uses the election of the current President of France as a focal point for discussing ideas. Thereby, Badiou manages to intersect two of my favorite things: politics and philosophy. And he writes really well, too.
The difficulty faced, of course, in this sort of consideration, is that Badiou is deeply concerned with what he calls “the real,” and in politics, finding the real is like finding the net proceeds from a film. Ça n’existe pas.
Badiou claims, I think correctly, that the distinctions we are used to, those of right and left, which arose from the political situation following the Second World War, are defunct. What he suggests has replaced right and left is one kind of fear over/against another kind of fear. The first kind of fear, the primal and used rather brilliantly by one party in the last US election cycle, is “essential:”
“This fear, conservative and gloomy, creates the desire for a master who will protect you, even if only while oppressing and impoverishing you all the more.”
The second kind of fear is simply fear of the first and its logical if not inevitable consequences.
I will just tell you that I took a personal comfort in the passage in which Badiou refers to Lacan’s cure for depression: shifting from a sense of impotence to impossibility.
But what does this actually mean? A number of things. It means finding a real point to hold on to, whatever the cost. It means no longer being in the vague net of impotence, historical nostalgia and the depressive component, but rather finding, constructing and holding onto a real point, which we know we are going to hold on to, precisely because it is a point uninscribable in the law of the situation, unanimously declared by the prevailing opinion to be both (and contradictorily) absolutely deplorable and completely impracticable, but which you yourselves declare that you are going to hold onto, whatever the cost; you are then in a position to raise impotence to impossibility. If you hold onto a point such as this, then you become a subject bound to the consequences of what is unanimously held to be a crazy disaster and happily quite impossible, but to which you grant reality and thereby make yourselves an exception to the depressive syndrome.
Long quote. Forgive me. I find this concept of taking oneself out of the context of being the object of a situation over which one has no control and choosing to be the subject of a “sentence” one writes for oneself deeply liberating on a personal level. If your life has ever gone to pieces rapidly and unpredictably, this sort of idea is actually rather useful, without regard to anything else in the book.
But I digress.
The core of the book can be found in the chapter “Only One World,” with which I must argue that while Badiou is correct in principle, in fact, there is not one world, there are at least two. I move back and forth between them every day. I agree, however, that it is this construction of the two (at least) worlds, and the reinforcement of their literal and ideological existence that creates much of the agony in the world today, while promising more tomorrow. (I was reminded of Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of Guilty Bystander as I read this chapter. The second world, the world of deprivation, is the direct construction, the denied child, of the first, or at least of the first as it presently exits.)
ETA: Here is how to tell if you livein the First World or the Second. If you think of anything smaller than a twenty dollar bill as useless wallet-clutter, You are a First World resident. If a Twenty (oranything larger) is useless to you, you live in the Second world.
Badiou is a damned smart man, and I hope I’ve done his concpets justice. As I say – this book is worth reading because it will make you think, never a bad thing. Re-examining our preconceptions is a very healthy activity.
Gerald Sampers, long-time resident of Tuscany, has had his home fall down the side of the mountain where it was formerly perched, and on his birthday. He and his guests just happened to notice the garage had gone and got themselves out in time. The following day, while surveying the damage from a helicopter, Sampers makes an offhand remark that’s taken much too seriously by the helicopter pilot. The consequences are as bizarre as they are far-reaching, and the end result is an opera you will wish you could actually see and won’t soon forget.
Sampers is the narrator of most of Rancid Pansies. He’s also a writer, a cook, and a delightfully arch critic of the world around him. As a narrator, he’s distinctly unreliable. As a social critic, he’s capable of delivering insightful observations so sharp you could cut yourself on them, without ever becoming base. It’s a neat trick, I’m not sure how he does it. At the same time, I was never sure if he (the character) was being deliberately thick for the sake of humor when he took a sign at a local church for a Pilates class as being a casting call for an upcoming Passion play, or if Samper really does live a life as récherché as that.
As a cook – well. Don’t read the first part while you’re eating, promise?
Hamilton-Paterson’s style is nothing short of brilliant. Anyone who can combine the phrases “Dernier cri” and “Blowing chunks” properly in a single sentence has my admiration.
Rancid Pansies is utterly hilarious, and it makes a point or two. Don’t miss it.
