<p style="text-indent: 0.5in">It might have been Peter Fonda who said, “If you can remember the 60’s, you weren’t really there.” We all know what he means, but to dismiss the entire decade as a plastic fantastic mind trip, a purple haze, or up in smoke, is to give the truly revolutionary things that happened during the 60’s: the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement that propelled the candidacy of Eugene McCarthy, and finally the Women’s Movement, short shrift.

<p style="text-indent: 0.5in">While some people spent the 60’s stoned out of their minds and avoiding the draft (me, for instance), others were on the front lines, marching in the South, protesting and working to destabilize the war, going to jail, and even dying for their beliefs.

<p style="text-indent: 0.5in">Hari Kunzru wasn’t born until 1969 by which time Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were dead and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam had already taken place. But he sure has a handle on the politics, especially the extreme politics of the era. Because it wasn’t all peace, love and granola; extremist groups like The Weathermen used violent, and sometimes deadly, means to try to achieve their ends.* Kunzru’s description of the inner workings of a revolutionary brotherhood working in London in the late 60’s and early 70’s is stark and chilling. They were cold blooded and uncompromising, even when it came to their fellow revolutionaries. They depended on absolute loyalty from their members and the means to those ends were such as would make a religious cult look like a kindergarten class. One means of achieving this is described as “Criticism-Self-Criticism.” Members of the group would literally lock themselves into a room, usually after taking acid, and pick away at each other’s defense mechanisms until the individual was removed and all that was left was the will of the Collective. According to their rules, “no one could leave… until the group agreed it was finished. Every interaction, every interrogation, had to run until the bitter end.”

<p style="text-indent: 0.5in">Chris Carver, the character whose revolution gives the book its eponymous title, lived as a revolutionary and then, of necessity, was reborn as Michael Frame, when the non-violent methods of the brotherhood began taking on a more radical cast. Carver, Sean Ward, and Anna Addison were the senior members of the group and they goaded each other to increasingly dramatic demonstrations of revolutionary fervor. But when Anna forged an association with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the group was ordered to assassinate a local businessman, Frame knew it was time to leave Carver behind. Taking the $5,000 the PFLP had given the group to close the deal and a passport he had for emergencies, Michael took off for Europe and the Far East. He wound up in Thailand, strung out and broke, where an old acquaintance found him and put him into a tough-love rehab program run by Buddhist monks. He stayed with the monks for four years before returning to England where he slowly began assembling the pieces that would constitute his new life. A wife, a home in the South of England, a step-daughter and a prospering business start-up help him put distance between himself and his past until one day he is accosted by a person who had been on the fringe of his group. This person seems to know entirely too much about his past and is intent on using Chris/Michael as a pawn in a political ploy directed against one of his former associates who has worked her way into a high-level Cabinet position.
    
<p style="text-indent: 0.5in">Chris, who has never revealed to his wife what his life was like before he became “Michael”, is faced with domestic problems and the prospect of jail time. He takes flight once again but realizes before he gets too far that there are only so many opportunities to remake one’s self in a lifetime. Sometimes the real revolution is deciding just who you are learning to live with yourself.

<p style="text-indent: 0.5in">Hari Kunzru is also author of The Impressionist, which won the Whitbread Best First Novel Award. He probably can be followed on Twitter but I have no idea how.
 
*“We were very careful… to be sure we weren't going to hurt anybody, and we never did hurt anybody. Whenever we put a bomb in a public space, we had figured out all kinds of ways to put checks and balances on the thing and also to get people away from it, and we were remarkably successful—Bill Ayers

Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory University in Atlanta, said in 2003, "The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence. I don't know what sort of defense that is."

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There is a lot of enthusiasm in our Library for the works of Tana French. Her first book, Into the Woods, introduced readers to Detective Cassie Maddox, working out of Dublin and teamed up with Detective Rob Ryan (both personally and professionally) to investigate a ritualistic looking murder in the woods near Knocknaree in County Dublin.

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<p style="text-indent: 0.5in;">

Along with Detective Sam O’Neill they solve the case but both Cassie and Rob are deeply affected by the events leading up to the resolution of the case and their relationship (both personal and professional) dissolves into fragments. Cassie asks for a transfer and at the beginning of The Likeness, French’s second book, Cassie is dating Sam and Rob has been ignobly demoted to a floater position outside Murder.

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<p style="text-indent: 0.5in;">

Tana French doesn’t serve up the usual pot-boiler mystery. Her characters are complex, the plots are intricate, and she takes the time to develop both elements very carefully. As far as the mystery goes, she plays her cards pretty close to the vest, letting the drama build as the characters interact and leads are considered and discarded. Occasionally, though, especially in the first book, she drops some pretty broad hints. One such hint, delivered about a third of the way through Into the Woods, tipped me off to the person behind the crime.

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<p style="text-indent: 0.5in;">

The books are absorbing, well-plotted and solid but the pace is sometimes excruciatingly slow, kind of like Blooms-day (after all, she is from Dublin). There is one scene in The Likeness  that goes on for about 26 pages when Cassie, who is working Undercover to track down the killer of her doppelgänger (long story there), confronts one of the chief suspects. Holy interrogation, Batman!

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<p style="text-indent: 0.5in;">

Which leads to another quibble: you wonder about the detachment of the detectives in Ms. French’s novels. In the first novel, Rob Ryan completely loses his detachment by allowing himself to become dangerously close to a relative of the victim, a girl of seventeen who turns out to be a suspect. In The Likeness, Cassie joins a group of post-graduates living in a house, a baronial waste inherited by one of the students, in another obscure corner of Dublin County. This group is presided over by Daniel, the owner of the house, who plays Heathcliff to Cassie’s Catherine Earnshaw, leading to the novel’s tragic denouement.

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<p style="text-indent: 0.5in;">

Quibbles aside, these books are both outstanding. The scenic descriptions are spot on. In fact, the land itself—Ireland, filled with ancient forces which lay sleeping but not dead, adds a good measure of atmosphere to the action.

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<blockquote>“There was something about the green hillsides that made me edgy… something stubborn and secretive.” [p.30-31]</blockquote>

<blockquote>“There was a tiny shift in the air around me, subtler than a breath, secretive, pleased.” [p. 141]</blockquote>

Even the house is animate:

<blockquote>“Something stirred, subtle and waking: a tiny ripple in the walls, a crack of floorboards, a draft spinning down the stairwell… “</blockquote>

<blockquote>“That stirring again, somewhere off the far edge of hearing: a whisk across the landing, a humming in the chimneys.” [pp. 398-99]</blockquote>

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Tana French is a very talented writer and we look forward to her next book.

NY Times review of The Likeness by Janet Maslin: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/books/17masl.html

Tana French’s website: www.tanafrench.com

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            Jun Nakayama, silent film star until his career abruptly ends in 1922, is rediscovered in 1964 when a journalist and silent movie buff locates him in order to conduct an interview. This leads to an offer to appear in a new film which Jun accepts with reservations, bringing back a host of unwelcome specters from his past.

            Paradoxically, Jun’s film career flourished at a time when the country as a whole, and California in particular, was becoming increasingly hostile to Asian-Americans. In spite of this, Jun starred in some of the biggest grossing pictures of his time and was a matinee idol; women swooned when he appeared on the screen.

            The book is told from Jun’s perspective and his stiff formality (a product of his traditional Japanese upbringing) causes him to shy away from aspects of his life that reveal a great deal about the events that led to the abrupt end of his career. He does not recognize the racial tension that is taking place all around him and how it affects his career; he makes highly questionable decisions in his relationship choices, seemingly blind to the one woman who is so obviously right for him. In the process he jeopardizes his own career and the career and lives of those closest to him. It is only at the end of the book that Jun finally recognizes the centrality of his choices to the direction his life and career have taken.

            Other reviewers have remarked on the similarity of this aspect of Jun’s character to that of Stevens, the English butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. The pace and setting of the novel lend themselves to this kind of brooding introspection. The film industry and Los Angeles itself were very different in the early part of the century; there was less glamour and it was as if all Angelenos were embarking on a voyage of discovery making the title, “The Age of Dreaming,” most apropos.

            In an interview the author, Nina Revoyr, states that the choice of silent movies as a plot device was entirely serendipitous. Her career had floundered a little. She was having trouble getting her second book (Southland) published and happened to find work with a nonprofit organization headquartered in a Hollywood mansion once owned by a silent film star. The actress in question, Mary miles Minter, had been a child star who became romantically involved with a Director who was murdered under mysterious circumstances, an element that is also present in the book. She was also intrigued by the career of Sessue Hayakawa, a Japanese actor who rose to prominence during the silent film era.

            This is a thoughtful, nuanced and beautifully written novel written by an author whose skill has grown exponentially in a very short span (her first book was published in 1998). An author to watch.

For books by Nina Revoyr and other intriguing selections go to the Publisher's website: http://www.akashicbooks.com

Imagine the horror:

The day was bright, the ceiling of the sky raised high. My father was gone, in Wau for business. This was only one week after we returned from Marial Bai. Again I was feeding the fire when my mother looked up. She was boiling water and again I had brought kindling. I saw her eyes looking over my shoulder.

I had not seen what my mother had seen. But there was sound. A vibration from under our feet. I looked for my sisters, but I knew they were by the river. My brothers were grazing the cattle. Wherever they were, they were either safe from the rumbling or already overtaken by it.

The rumbling did not come from tanks or heavy artillery: it was the rumble of hoofbeats. There were easily two or three hundred, or more now. The murahaleen, or travelers which is the meaning of the Arab word, raiders from Northern Sudan, Arabs, though they look no different from the people of the South. They will plunder, burn, rape and kill. The men will die, the women, boys and girls enslaved. Some like Valentino Achak Deng will escape. They will wander until they find other “lost” boys, and then they will attempt to escape to Ethiopia. Along the way they are strafed by army helicopters, bomber by military planes, attacked by lions and crocodiles.

What is being described is a small village in Southern Sudan in the early 1980’s as it is being overrun by marauders who have been sanctioned by the government in the North to destroy and enjoy the spoils with impunity. How does one explain—especially to a child—a conflict that involves the struggle to control a country with scant resources, a civil war that involves people who are more alike than they are different, who have coexisted for centuries and now are in a war of attrition? Until relatively recently the international community (including the United States) has remained silent about war in the Sudan. Just as in the Middle East where hostilities between Sunnis and Shiites are part of a fabric of internecine conflict going back to the death of Muhammad, people attempt to explain away the conflict in Sudan as attributable to “centuries old tribal disagreements” as a rationale for non-involvement. Meanwhile, the death toll in Sudan, including war related fatalities and victims of famine, is in the millions. Thousands have been displaced, including the famous “Lost Boys,” some of whom found their way to the United States through a resettlement program. Valentino Achak Deng, who spent eleven years in a refugee camp in Kenya before finally being admitted to the U.S.

Getting to the United States was an impossible dream for a boy who was forced to flee his village at the tender age of six. One would think that having survived starvation, strafing, bombing, lions and crocodiles, Valentino’s problems would be over. And yet in the opening pages of the Autobiography he is forced onto the floor of the apartment he shares in Atlanta with his friend, , another Lost Boy who found himself in America, while he is being robbed. By this time, Valentino has been in the United States for several years and the enthusiasm he felt upon his arrival has given away to disillusionment and frustration. In spite of the fact that he is articulate and well educated (at least by refugee camp standards; he was a U.N. employee), Valentino has trouble getting accepted into a four year college. He also has a hard time making ends meet in the jobs that are available to him. But it is the distrust he feels that is the most difficult to bear. To the black population he and his African friends are freaks. They, in turn, prove a great puzzlement to Valentino. The white population which initially embraced the resettlement of the Sudanese in communities across the country: Atlanta, Kansas City, Seattle, now view them as erratic and prone to violence.

So Valentino expresses his frustration in imagined conversations with the people who come to rob him, to his benefactors and detractors, and to the people whose cards he swipes at the exercise club where he works for $8. an hour in Atlanta. In Marial Bai, where he grew up in Southern Sudan, Valentino’s father had many wives and cattle. While not rich, no one in the village was rich, they prospered and were happy. They had good relations with their Arab neighbors. Forced to leave with nothing he makes an amazing journey across a thousand miles of desert and jungle to find himself a victim of another act of senseless violence. Throughout this ordeal he never loses his equanimity. He is playful, tender, and appealing. As Francine Prose put it in her review in the New York Times (Dec. 24, 2006), “The considerable force of Valentino’s personality and the force of Eggar’s talent turn this eyewitness account of a terrible tragedy into a paradoxically pleasurable experience.” And there is a happy ending, although it is only hinted at in the book’s conclusion. Valentino does get accepted into college and he returns to his homeland (with Dave Eggars) a hero.

The Tenderness of Wolves opens in a tiny village in Canada on the Dove River near the Georgian Bay. It takes place in 1860. The villagers, mostly Scotch, have been living in those parts for about thirteen years. The climate is harsh but the settlers have succeeded in carving out a precarious footing in their adopted homeland. Since they have been neighbors, if not friends, for so long, crime is virtually unheard of. They don’t have a jail and their magistrate is a retired attorney. So the townspeople are ill-prepared when a French Canadian trapper is found murdered in his cabin. The crime sets into motion a chain of events that effects just about every one of the villagers and tests the fabric of their close-knit community.

Off all the families the Ross family is the most deeply affected. They lived closest to the murdered man and it is their son, Francis who discovers the body. When Francis suddenly disappears suspicion falls on him, until a mysterious stranger, another trapper, is apprehended searching the dead man’s cabin. Representatives from the Hudson Bay Company are brought in to dispatch justice and they are all too willing to allow Parker, the half-breed trapper, who had once worked for the Company and has a history of violence, to take the rap. But Mr. Knox, the local Magistrate, resents Parker’s mistreatment at the hands of the Company representatives and, believing him to be innocent, allows him to escape. Parker and Francis’ mother, Mrs. Ross, become unlikely allies as they join together to track Francis. Neither of them believes that Francis is the murderer but they suspect that he was tracking the real murderer when he left so suddenly. This leads to a series of events that take Parker, Mrs. Ross, and Donald from the Hudson Bay Company off into the wilds of Canada, into the teeth of an arctic storm where they find unexpected succor in a compound maintained by members of a Norwegian fundamentalist religious group. There, too, they find Francis. But the trail doesn’t end there. The trio set off further into the wild on the trail of the real murderer winding up in a very remote outpost known more for drunkenness and violence than fur-trading.

The denouement occurs, like much of the book, in a bleak, wild, deserted location. It is ironic that the books author, Stef Penney, has never visited because she has agoraphobia. It is such a vividly imagined setting and the action is so compelling that, even though it is her first novel, Tenderness of Wolves was selected for the Costa Award out of 580 entries, including William Boyd’s excellent spy novel Restless.

 Formerly know as the Whitbread, The Costa Award recognizes the most enjoyable books of the year written by an author in the UK or Ireland. We are one of only three libraries in the state that currently owns it.