The Russia House

I wonder what it was like to read The Russia House as the Soviet Union was collapsing.  Back then, I was mostly reading what my parents called "books without words" (chemistry and chemical engineering textbooks), and lighter weight mysteries to take my mind off polymerization and kinetics. 30 years later, we know how things turned out, and once again Russia is an enemy, albeit not officially declared.

That time lapse colors my view of The Russia House.  I know how pointless Barley Blair's missions, but perhaps that's the entire point.  Blair is the head of a small, family-owned publishing house, one that specializes in safe, unchallenging genre fiction. On a prior trip to the Moscow Book Fair, he spent a long, vodka-soaked afternoon with a few writers and a physicist.  Several years later, that physicist gives his former lover three notebooks he wants published in the west, and she gives them to Blair's representative at the latest book fair.  It seems simple, but of course it's not.  Blair is only tangentially involved in his company's business at this point, more interested in leading a slightly dissipated life in Spain, and no one knows whether the notebooks are legitimate.  MI6 takes a chance on Blair and the notebooks and sends him to Moscow where he falls in love with his contact.  As is the case with many of LeCarre's books, the complex plot ultimately leads to a disquieting futility, but his use of language is superb.

The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory

Sometimes a book ends up being even better than expected. That's how I felt about The Guardian of All Things.  I was expecting an analysis of how human memory works, but that was Micael S. Malone's starting point.  From simple memories, he moved into memory tricks, then writing, and eventually into the electronic resources which have allowed us to store simple facts we formerly needed to memorize, freeing our memories for more complex and interesting information. Like an episode of Connections without the puns (Malone mentions the show as one of his inspirations, and that he mapped out his book during a lunch with James Burke) The Guardian of All Things seamlessly linked apparently disparate events as it traveled through history.

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

I read Mark Krulansky's Salt about 15 years ago, so I had high expectations for The Big Oyster.  That's probably why I was disappointed.  More a history of New York City (to which as a Philadelphian I am naturally resistant) than of oysters, I found it interesting but not as engrossing as Krulansky's earlier work.   Starting with the importance of oysters to Native Americans and running through the Gilded Age into today, the book didn't tell me anything I didn't know about history and not enough of what I wanted to know about oysters.  Well written and researched, it just didn't grab me.

Ordeal by Innocence

Agatha Christie considered Ordeal by Innocence one of her best books, and I agree.  Two years after  Jocko Argyle died of pneumonia while serving a life sentence for killing his mother, Arthur Calgary appears to confirm Argyle's alibi.  It's a tribute to Christie's puzzle-making skills that this isn't as contrived as it sounds - Carlyle is an archaeologist who suffered a concussion in an accident shortly after dropping Jocko (who'd been hitchhiking) off at his destination, and left on a two year expedition of Antartica immediately after being released from the hospital.  He only learned of the high-profile murder case while wrapping items for storage in old newspapers after his return.  Determined to right the wrong, he contacts the Argyle family and finds out (as is usual in Christie's novels, particularly the murder in retrospect ones) that everyone either has a motive or no alibi for Mrs. Argyle's murder. The solution is one of Christie's most clever, simultaneously well supported and surprising. The only problem is that I now want to see the absolutely horrible 1985 version starring Donald Sutherland.  It's deservedly obscure and while I could probably buy a DVD of it somewhere, I don't want to waste the money. Wasting two hours to determine how good of a book could have produced one of the worst A-list movies of the 1980s would be enough.

Lady Vernon and her Daughter

I haven't read any of Jane Austen's juvenilia or her unfinished novels. Jane Rubino's and Caitlen Rubino-Bradway's completion of Lady Susan probably shouldn't count.  They created a standard novel around Austen's epistolary fragment but even though they brought the story back to Lady Susan's courtship, don't manage to fully flesh out the story and characters.  Susan doesn't live up to her reputation as a schemer, her daughter Frederica is Fanny Price without the abuse or the backbone, and the villains (Austen's specialty) are not only unmemorable but indistinguishable. Even a cameo from the Eliots and Mrs. Smith didn't decrease my disappointment.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

No one could have done well as the US Ambassador to Germany in 1933, and no one wanted the job, except for William E. Dodd.  An academic who thought the posting would give him time to work on his history of the American South, he was completely unprepared for Hitler's Germany.  Dodd brought his family along, including his daughter Martha who became romantically involved with both Gestapo and Russian Communist officers.  Martha's personal story (Larson used her diaries as a primary source) dilutes the horror a bit, but I came away from In the Garden of Beasts admiring Larson's skill as a writer but too disturbed to have enjoyed the book.

A Grave Concern

Matthew Bartholomew and his associates in 14th Century Cambridge are old friends by now, not just to each other but also to me.  IT's the advantage of a long-running series - we know and appreciate the characters' foibles and Susannah Gregory can use them to plausibly send her detectives along the wrong path.

A Grave Concern opens with change.  Michael house has a new, repellant fellow n the young and arrogant Kolvyle, Sheriff Tulyet has Sir John Moyles as a prisoner with privileges (he's a favorite of the King), and Brother Michael is about to leave for a bishopric.  That would be enough without a new barber surgeon committing malpractice on Matt's patients while accusing him of encroaching on his profession, battling monument makers, and an increase in smuggling.  Not to Gregory who adds the murder of Chancellor Tynknell. Soon Moylens is dead too - murdered i the same way and three of the five candidates to replace Tynknell are no longer in the running. One is dead, one (along with an apprentice) is missing, and the third has withdrawn.  Michael, Matt, and Tulyet are experienced investigators, but they're hampered by Matt's medieval ethics, the increasing feebleness of Tulyet's sergeant, and Michael's needs o solve the case and install a proper puppet - I mean Chancellor - before he leaves Cambridge.  A Grave concern ties together several complicated plot lines and allows our detectives to serve justice after several false conclusions.  The personal stories, however, have a bit of a twist, and I'm looking forward to Matthew Bartholomew's 23rd Chronicle.