Ta Da!

 

It’s officially official

I would have posted it sooner, buy I didn’t know where to find it.

Review: Blue Skies

 

I've decided to add a few book reviews to the blog, especially for new books, including books which may not yet have hit the stands yet (through the good graces of Netgalley. For my inaugural review, I've selected T.C. Boyle's eco-black comedy, Blue Skies.

 Of Blue Skies I am two minds, as perhaps was T.C. Boyle when he set down to write this book. A simple family tale or a polemic on climate change? Are the characters agents of their own actions, or has climate change replaced fate as the controller of lives? Are we doomed by our past actions, or do we simply make do?

 It’s a plodding plot, not so much a plot as a situation—situation dystopia. The world is seen alternately through the eyes of earnest mother Ottile (the wife of a doctor, comfortably middle-class) and her grown children, the somewhat superficial daughter Cat, and son Cooper, an entomologist and the Cassandra figure of the tale. Cat lives with fiancé Todd in Florida, while he other two are in California. One coast in perpetual drought and the other perpetually water-logged. Whole neighborhoods go up in flames on one coast while whole neighborhoods are reclaimed by the sea on the others.

The setting is not some future dystopia, but the dystopia of today and perhaps the next eight or so years in the future. The story captures the mundanity of experience at the end of the world. Sundowners and king tides (two weather phenomena I’m not familiar with, but apparently soon will be) intrude on the rituals which mark our lives, marriages and births and deaths. There are moments of joy and tragedy, as in any lives, and whether those tragedies are caused by a collapsing planet or human inertia and hubris is rather fuzzy.

 This was by no means a slog to read. The story is underpinned by diamond-hard prose which is a pleasure to read. Characters are fully realized and complex. Perhaps it’s the author’s ambivalence, whether our world is truly at an end, or whether we can survive on cricket cookbooks and drones for pollinating our crops, that leaves me scratching my head. We’ll all muddle through somehow.

Euphemisms

  

 

Right now The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart is with my editor. Normally I don’t change anything in a draft while my editor is going through it. But lately I’ve been waking up at three in the morning with urgent, miniscule changes to this one. For instance the other night I immediately had to change the word “syphilis” to “the French complaint.”

Why did the question of syphilis even come up in a Sherlock Holmes tale? Oh, that’s simple. It explains Watson’s familiarity with sunglasses in 1924.

Review: The House of Silk

 The House of Silk is a bright red herring. It’s misdirection. If you’ve read Anthony
Horowitz (and I’ve only dipped a toe in that deep lake), you know that misdirection is his specialty. What’s safe to tell you? It’s a Sherlock Holmes tale, pre-Reichenbach Falls, and it starts out with a simple little mystery that snowballs (thanks to a murder that wounds Holmes to the core) into a giant conspiracy which lands Holmes in the mulligatawny so badly that even God (for God, read: Mycroft Holmes) cannot help him. Watson and Lestrade can’t help him. It’s so bad that even his mortal enemy tries to help him. 

   He gets out of the frying pan (through a fine bit of misdirection—and goes right back into the fire. We rarely see Holmes take such foolhardy risks as he does in this tale, but we have seen it when his dander is truly up, and it often places him on the wrong side of the law. And we rarely see him place Watson in such peril, but Watson is always faithful, even in the teeth of a trap.

     It's not a perfect tale. Giant conspiracies have a way of living another day. And there’s a wholly unnecessary cameo by a favorite villain (I have a feeling it’s a setup for a sequel.) But when the giant herring is finally landed, there’s an extremely satisfying ending to the minnow mystery we began with. The hand is quicker than the eye. An indispensable addition to your Holmes collection. 

     (Did I give away a shred of the plot? No? Good.)