Edward Glyver has a personal demon.  This demon is Phoebus Daunt, a pretentious poet who has the backing of the rich and powerful Lord Tansor of Evenwood.  Daunt, lauded by the masses and the critics alike, has been a rising star ever since Edward Glyver first met him as a young man in school.  In fact, Daunt stands to inherit Evenwood as Lord Tansor’s chosen successor.  However, Edward Glyver believes that he is in fact the true and rightful heir to the wealthy estate.  And killing Phoebus Daunt is on his mind.

Michael Cox, who sadly passed away recently, spins a Victorian tale that hearkens back to an era of writing not seen since authors such as Dickens, Bronte and Collins.  The plot sprawls across the pages like Dickensian London and is filled with moments of wealth and extravagance as well as sordid criminal elements and shady back-alley dealings.  The tale unravels in twists and turns while leading the reader closer and closer to Glyver’s ultimate and vengeful goal, and the writing mimics and satirizes the overly ornate writing of the Victorian era.  Glyver, the protagonist, is at once likeable and dangerous, trustworthy and deceiving, caring and apathetic, a man on a dangerous and immoral mission whose heart, for the most part, remains benevolent.  Yes, Glyver entertains whores and smokes opium, but what Victorian gentleman didn’t?  He is a man beset by hardships who is able to pull himself up out of an impoverished life and create opportunities for himself, and along the way, murder and mystery ensue.  And why shouldn’t it?  This is a man who has been cheated out of his wealth, a Victorian occupier of Wall Street.

The novel is enormous and I read it slowly while also plowing through some lighter fare (Inkheart, Hunger Games).  The premise is built upon one single notion, and the book will largely hold your interest if you in fact want to know more about the journey than the destination.  The very fact that I read at least six other books while reading The Meaning of Night indicates that it can be a slow process, but ultimately, the resolution and revelations toward the end (along with a feeling of accomplishment) made reading the book a rewarding experience.  There is a sequel out there somewhere.  If I take my time getting to that, I should be finished with it by next November.

Cox, Michael. The Meaning of Night: A Confession. New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 2007.

St. Oswald’s caters to the privileged and gifted sons of families and seeks to provide a rigorous liberal arts education to the young men who attend the hallowed institution.  With nearly a thousand students roaming the halls of academia, the expectations for each individual student is high.  The school does everything in it’s power to maintain the balance between tradition and evolving education.  This begins and ends with carefully selected faculty members, administrators, and staff whose only duty is to stoke the light of knowledge within each student.

But like many schools built on centuries of mores and expectations, mustiness pervades the corridors.  Chinks and cracks form in the bricks.  Windows accumulate dust until a fine layer of translucent grime covers their panes.  The history of the school rests on the success of its many pupils, but no history is complete without a touch of scandal and a hint of the sordid.  Above all, it is maintaining the inherent dignity of the name, St. Oswald’s, that drives teachers and students alike.

Roy Straitley, the sole remaining classics teacher at the esteemed school, has withstood the passage of time, bravely fought off the introduction of technology, maintained the decency to wear his school robes to teach in, and operates on the firm belief that his pupils are individuals to be respected and nurtured.  The faces of his students and colleagues may change, but St. Oswald’s remains the same unwavering bastion of education it has always been.  “Quaz” (as Straitley his nicknamed by the kids) is old school.  He recites Latin quotes to his colleagues while drinking tea from the same mug he always has.  However, this school year starts off with Straitley in the middle of a turf war with the German teachers who have continually been trying to take over his office and room.  These machinations annoy him to no end, but as the year progresses, those annoyances fade to dull murmur as things at St. Oswald’s rapidly and dangerously spin out of control.  What Roy doesn’t know is that someone has infiltrated the fiber of the school, and they are plotting to tear it apart from the inside out.

Joanne Harris weaves two narratives together to bring the past and present workings of this revered private school to life, and she does so in such a way that the readers find themselves putting the clues together at the same pace as they unfold in the book. The narrators, one of which is Roy Straitley, tell parallel stories from their alternating perspectives.  Woven in to their thoughts are the stories from their past that have not only left their imprint but continue to drive them in their actions.

Amazingly, the author manages to write from two very different perspectives, and the narrators each have their own distinct personality and style.  This is especially important since there are not too many ways to initially distinguish who is narrating each chapter.  This also allows the reader to fully engage with both narrators and encourages the necessary empathy needed to appreciate the astounding climax to the story.

This is a book well worth reading, but please don’t take any ideas away from it.

Harris, Joanne. Gentlemen and Players. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

The Erard Piano was, by all accounts, the most popular piano of the late 1700′s and early 1800′s.  An international success, the piano inhabited the most illustrious homes around the world.  They were even commissioned by King Louis XVI for the royal French courts.  While they have fallen out of favor in the last century or so, their influence on the piano industry will forever be remembered.  It is this type of piano, the Erard, in the midst of the British occupation of Burma in 1886 upon which Daniel Mason’s subtle exploration of the human mind revolves.

Edgar Drake is a piano tuner.  Passionate about his craft, obsessive about the minutia, Drake spends his days tuning the pianos of London’s wealthier music patrons.  Therefore, he is surprised when the British War Office commissions him to participate in their war efforts in Burma.  One of their key officers in the work to pacify the Burmese, Dr. Anthony Carroll, has requested a tuner be sent out to tune his Erard piano.  Called in to her Majesty’s service, Edgar is filled with excitement and trepidation.  The prospect of leaving the safety of his established life and traveling by train and by ship to the far reaches of the British Empire whets Edgar’s appetite for adventure, and he embarks on the journey of a lifetime.

As he sets out from England, traveling by boat past the mysteries of Northern Africa and on through the Suez Canal, he becomes captivated by the mysterious Dr. Anthony Carroll.  A surgeon turned Major, Carroll is brokering peace with most martial of the Burmese tribes, and he seems to be doing it through completely unorthodox and non violent methods.  The closer the piano tuner gets to his destination, the more the mystery deepens.  Like a moth to a flame, the reader is given the impression that Edgar Drake is slowly spiraling toward some greater event in which his work will be the key that unlocks Dr. Anthony Carroll’s ambitions in Burma.

There is something to be said for the idea of the “journey” being just as important as the “destination”.  However, in a historical mystery of this proportion, I would say that the destination is pretty important.  Mason, the author, gets lost in the journey.  His descriptions of the world the piano tuner moves through are vivid and enchanting.  He does a tremendous job of offering the reader plenty of opportunities to think through events without overly narrating, and even when some events feel random and obscure, they are vividly brought to life.  However, by the time the novel draws to a close, there is a strong sense that somewhere along the way, something was missed.

The story feels familiar on a literary level.  At times, I felt like I might be reading a less noirish version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  I haven’t taken too much extra time to compare the mesmerizing character of Kurtz with that of Dr. Carroll, but the overall experience feels very similar.  Edgar Drake’s journey into the depths of Burma and the subsequent stories of Carroll create the kind of mystery about Carroll that Marlow felt for Kurtz.  Unfortunately, The Piano Tuner never quite succeeds in the same way that Heart of Darkness did. But as a read about the beauty and exotic locals of a far gone time, the book recreates the enchantment people must have felt when every trip abroad promised adventure.

Mason, Daniel. The Piano Tuner. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2002.

The book has, at its root, a pretty good premise.  Quentin, angsty and nerdy, embodies the spirit and thoughts of many a young man.  He pines for the love his life while he watches her date the type of guy he wishes he could be.  Meanwhile, he longs to be different and wishes he could escape into the fantasy books that he loved as a child.

As it turns out, Quentin is different.  He can do magic.  Not the Chris Angel or David Copperfield kind (he can do a little of that too), but real magic using spells and conjuration.  A college for magic admits him based on a grueling test.  And so it goes… This is ground well traveled.  Not surprisingly, Quentin finds a social group, falls in love with someone who loves him back, and goes on a series of adventures and misadventures.

But for some reason, the book never really summons up the same magic that its characters can.   Quentin is a tough character to root for.  Even though he is able to accomplish some things, his ill-timed mistakes and social faux-pas dis-endear him with the reader.  While this may be considered part of the growing process, Quentin doesn’t always learn from his mistakes.

In all fairness, there are some surprising twists and turns, and to the credit of the author, the characters inhabit a space much realer than most.  This is not the magic of Harry Potter.  There is a roughness to the magic that strips away any gloss.  It is apparent early on to Quentin that learning magic isn’t quite what he thought it would be, and since he and his friends make the same knuckle and bone headed decisions most college students make, life doesn’t get much easier for Quentin.

The author does challenge some intriguing ideas: the fantasy we appreciate and love in movies and novels, if made real, would most likely kill us.  And ultimately, this is what the novel has most in its favor.  It throws out the dreamy fantasy we are used to and gives it a grit and edge that more books could use.  I am hoping for a very redeeming sequel.

The author spends copious time setting the stage for his two main characters.  One is Mikael Blomkvist, a die-hard journalist renowned for his willingness to sink his teeth into a story and not let go until it is finished.  Blomkvist starts the novel on the wrong side of the law, having recently been misled by a source and left to fend for himself among his own ravenous journalist peers.  After being sentenced to prison for a short time and then released, he finds himself targeted by a wealthy titan of industry who has a troubling and mysterious past that needs to be solved.  In return for this man’s financial promises, Mikael must spend a year working to uncover the truth that has for so long eluded all those involved

The second character, referred to in the novels’ titles as “The Girl”, is Lisbeth Salandar, a young woman with a startling past, a host of medically diagnosed neurological disorders, a photographic memory, and a penchant for computer hacking.  Lisbeth has her own troubling and mysterious past, yet it is her present that is the most disquieting.  Cared for by an abusive state representative, we quickly realize that the girl with the dragon tattoo is a force to be reckoned with.  As she works toward attaining her own goal of independence from the state, she takes a job working for Mikael Blomvkist.

The two lives become irrevocably intertwined, and the author takes on us on a dizzying journey into the depths of human depravity and injustice, a place where those entrusted with the care of others are morally derelict, and the reader is swept in and out of the very best and worst of human society.

There are a few books I have read, and due to their content, decided not to watch the movie because just the experience of reading was heart rending enough.  The Kite Runner is one such novel.  I have now added The Millennium Trilogy to the list.  As hard as it is to recognize that people will often sacrifice their own values for their own selfishness or even a misconceived greater good, it is even harder to read about the people who are savagely ignored and injured by those choices.   I was shocked to read that the author of these books very much resembles his main character, and it makes me wonder how closely aligned are these plots and real life.  I hope there is a distinct separation between his fiction and our realities.

Max Brooks has written a book that combines the traditional view of zombies with a much more modern setting that takes the reader back to that initial fear first felt when zombies descended on small towns to feast on the flesh of the living.  World War Z is a sequel of sorts to what should be a household staple, The Zombie Survival Guide.  How people can sleep at night without an escape plan in case of a zombie attack, I don’t know.  But this latest book, WWZ, takes us past a step-by-step survival plan, and picks up the story after the attack has already happened.  In this version of the world, the zombies have already infested the planet, lurching their way through each country as the governments struggle to at first contain the outbreak, then control it, and finally, fight it.  From the first cases to the fall of nations, the entire struggle is detailed rather brilliantly through personal narratives of those who went through.

Brooks acts as a journalist interviewing those people who lived through the traumatic events.  His interviewees include doctors, government aides, soldiers, civilians and criminals.  Each interview manages to touch on a portion of the world’s struggle with zombies to create a picture which encompasses everything.  Like his previous book, The Zombie Survival Guide, Brooks uses this novel to critique the societies we live.  While it may be impossible to imagine that zombies ever have or will exist, the way in which people, communities, cities and governments deal with the threat in Brooks’ book don’t seem too far fetched from events that have and are currently taking place in the world.  He details a frightening fictional topic, but it is how he imbues it with a sense of reality that leaves you truly terrified.  A doctor is thrust into a room with the deceased bound and shackled.  A mother finds her children being dragged away in the night.   Russian soldiers attempting to flee the infection are forced to murder their own comrades.  A flood of refugees clogs a road in India and hundreds are trampled as the military loses control of the evacuation.   These personal tales bring the stories of the undead to life.

Is that too cheesy?

Due to the popularity of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, most fantasy books followed a similar plot arc complete with fictional maps, expansive histories, richly imagined languages, and epic adventures.  Hobbits were untouchable, but elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, trolls and wizards lived on.

Star Wars also influenced many science fiction books, replacing stories like 2001: A Space Odyssey with swashbuckling space tales.  Spaceships no longer plodded through space, swords became standard fare, and roguish pirates were all the rage thanks to Han Solo

But that was back in the day.

In my mind, The Bartimaeus Trilogy bucks those trends in favor of more modern ones.

With the explosion of Harry Potter onto the lit scene (a book I first heard about from my friend’s Dutch parents when I was in college), wizards and magicians have been thrown into modern times and are no longer relegated to Middle Earths or even Medieval times.  Similarly, the success of Twilight (for proof of success see the review of Breaking Dawn in a previous posting) has spawned vampire and werewolf stories set in the midst of urban, modern areas.

The Bartimaeus Trilogy follows a similar suit.  Magicians have ascended to prominent positions (Prime Minister, Chief of Security etc) in the English government and throughout Europe because of the power they wield.  In what is a very nice touch, the author locates the power of the magicians in “demons” which are summoned and forced into servitude.  Magicians who can summon powerful demons to do their bidding are therefore more powerful and achieve greater status.

Unfortunately for the magicians, the demons do not enjoy being torn from their homes and forced to live a life of servitude.  If a magician were ever to get careless, the demon would immediately set upon the magician and kill him or her.  This threat ensures that magicians treat their demons with cruelty, caution and arrogance.  Magicians despise demons, demons despise magicians,  and so the cycle continues.

All of this leads us to Nathaniel, a small boy living under the tutelage of a rather ordinary magician who cruelly mistreats him and doesn’t recognize the boy’s immense potential.

The boy lashes out at this cruel treatment by summoning the powerful demon, Bartimaeus.

Bartimaeus has the ego of a Greek hero, the wit of a British comedian, and more sarcasm then even, well, me.  His outrage at being summoned by a mere boy to carry out childish whims leads him to say and do all sorts of humorous and potentially dangerous things.  Every few paragraphs we are treated to Bartimaeus’ narcissistic footnotes to his personal history.

After Nathaniel is humiliated by some elder magicians who firmly believe in the phrase “might makes right”, he sets Bartimaeus on a task to steal one of the magicians most powerful charms, the Amulet of Samarkand.  In doing so, Nathaniel unwittingly uncovers a plot to overthrow the current Prime Minister and puts himself and others around him in excessive danger.

Jonathan Stroud, the author, sets up an odd dynamic.  The expected hero of the story, Nathaniel, becomes as unpleasant as protagonists come.  His ambition makes him naive, unsavory, cold-hearted, and eventually gains him a foothold in the government at the expense of his soul (not literally).  On the other hand, Bartimaeus, who has very little free will of  his own, quickly wins the reader over to his side through his humor, feisty temperament and surprising grasp of what it means to be morally good.

Over the three books, the two characters trade barbs, indulge in their historical enmity, and generally don’t get along unless they have to.  By tracing the arc of Nathaniel’s maturity through his adventures with Bartimaeus, the reader comes to care about both characters and along the way there are gripping plot twists and exciting battles.

These books were certainly enjoyable and should resonate with many young adults.  There is no shortage of gore and death, and the author finds time to sprinkle in a bit of romance while he is busy setting the stage for magical machinations and enthralling escapades.

Stroud, Jonathan.  The Amulet of Samarkand. New York: Hyperion Books, 2003.

This book caught my eye a number of times in various bookstores before I ever purchased it.  At first I thought it would be a book following the veins of film noir, and the one time I briefly turned it over, I hastily scanned the back until I got to the word Chicago.  Unless the book was a racist diatribe on Michael Jordan’s ascendancy as the greatest basketball player ever within the fabled Windy City (which I highly doubted), I did not think Chicago or this book had anything to offer.  But I eventually succumbed to the lure of the eerie cover.  The cover was too intriguing, so I picked it up and quickly became engrossed in one of the most interesting true stories I’ve ever read.

Unbeknown to me, Chicago hosted the World’s Fair in 1893.  To Chicago, this was a victory over other great cities in the United States, including New York, St. Louis and San Francisco.  It was a bitter fight to the finish and when it finally came down to the final vote, men and women crowded the streets awaiting the outcome. Competition between the cities became so intense that a prominent New Yorker pledged himself to be vivisected by Jack the Ripper were Chicago to win.  Residents of Chicago promptly telegrammed him the good news.

Chicago was a city in turmoil.  Far from being united, the city was a mess of civil servants jockeying for power, unions wielding a heavy hammer, and an inordinate amount of criminals patrolling the streets looking for victims.  Once the announcement had sunk in, committees needed to be formed, architects reined in,  and a plan had to be hatched.  Paris had held the last great World’s Fair and unveiled their crowning achievement, the Eiffel Tower.  Chicago wanted to not only rival the Parisian fair but outdo it.  The task was enormous.

Amidst the frantic preparations, backstabbing, bribes, problems, confusions, and general political debauchery that accompanied this undertaking, a more sinister note was being struck.  A serial killer was running loose in the streets of Chicago and preying on the young, single women who were coming in droves to find work in the rapidly expanding urban area.

Larson intertwines two stories that are equally as engrossing as they are different.  In one he explores the architects and engineers of the World’s Fair as they work to do the impossible.  Their vision of a White City built along the waterfront of the great lake encountered setback after setback.  The shocking number of people that had to work together to create one vision in of itself creates a memorable read.  But Larson pairs that with the story of Herman Mudgett, who changed his name to Holmes once he moved to Chicago and proceeded to embark upon one of the most shocking series of killings imaginable.  Handsome, personable and uncannily intelligent, Holmes immerses himself and his prey in a web of lies that is nearly untraceable.  While the world turns its eyes to Chicago and the development of the World’s Fair, Holmes proceeds to stalk those same streets and leaves the charred bones of his victims behind.

Well written, suspenseful and utterly engrossing, Erik Larson brings 1893 Chicago and, perhaps fortunately and unfortunately, its fascinating and frightening characters to life.

Larson, Erik. The Devil in the White City.  New York: Vintage Books, 2003.

Ruiz Zafon’s second novel inhabits a similar space. His first novel, The Shadow of the Wind, was brought to my attention by a Chilean friend of mine who typically enjoys novels infused with magical realism.  Authors such as Isabel Allende and Garci Marquez frequently add touches of magical realism to their stories.  In my mind, The Shadow of the Wind turned out to be a wonderful novel and a very engaging read.  The love struck but unlucky teenager who discovers a mysterious book only to find out that copies of it are systematically being destroyed winds up in a number of macabre situations which propels the reader around Barcelona in the mid 1900’s.  Brilliant book.

The Angel’s Game, also set in Barcelona and scantly but firmly linked to The Shadow of the Wind, introduces us to another teenager.  From a broken home he slowly raises himself out of poverty by working for a newspaper and sheltering himself under the wing of an older writer.  This time Barcelona is recovering from WWI, and our young protagonist, David Martin, aspires to be a novelist.  As he slowly builds a name for himself over the years through his pulp fiction, he struggles to be the writer he wants to be until a French publisher by the name of Andreas Corelli commissions him to write a book.  But the money and good fortune that goes with the commission quickly dwindles, and David Martin slowly uncovers not only the twisted history of the house he lives in, but also the dangerous game his employer is playing with him.  There are subtle and not so subtle hints that the man behind the lucrative contract might be the Devil himself, the Bringer of Light.  The more enmeshed be becomes in the history surrounding him, the darker the gothic shadows that try to envelop him.

This time around, Ruiz Zafon fills his novel with enough twists and turns to make even the staunchest stomach weak.  As a hero, or perhaps an anti-hero, David does not provide the type of credibility one would need to sustain such a incongruous plot, and I found myself often wondering who was going crazy, myself or Mr. Martin?  The author has no problems painting Barcelona as a city filled with sinister alleys, morbid histories, and people who in one way or another are damned.  But as the story quickly unravels and re-winds itself into different shapes, David’s experiences never quite connect to form the same sort of cohesive thriller as in the first novel.  I have checked the bookshelf every time I visit the bookstore for a new novel from this author (look under R, not Z), and it might be natural that I created too great of expectations.   However, when the way got rough, I plowed ahead because I know what the author is capable of, and even here when he gets it right, you cannot question his sense of morbidity.  His unpredictable characters inhabit a world of shadows and mystery and they will stick with you even after you’ve stopped reading.  I still have hope that the third installment will take me back to the same magic I experienced the first time around.

Cover your heart!

Ruiz Zafon, Carlos. The Angel’s Game, Doubleday, New York, 2009.

Review: Henry Townsend, once a slave belonging to William Robbins, the son of Augustus Townsend (who bought himself out of slavery at the age off 22) and Mildred Townsend (purchased out of slavery by Augustus at the age of 26) was himself freed by his loving parents somewhere around 1843 when he too was entering his twenties. Due to the fact that Henry continued to be the property of William Robbins during the intervening years before his freedom, as well as the fact that his parents were only allowed to see Henry on Sundays, the relationship between the newly freed son and his parents struggled to live up to the promise that freedom held. Their unease with each other grows even more once Henry Townsend, a freed black man, purchases his own slaves.

Henry continues to amass wealth through the purchase of slaves, and he attempts to run his property to the best of his abilities. The advice that William Robbins, the owner of 113 slaves and Henry’s former master, gives him helps Henry keep his human chattel in line. Henry marries Caldonia, and it is Caldonia who must take over when Henry dies unexpectedly. She struggles to keep the estate running properly, and her life and the lives of the slaves she owns and is left to preside over disintegrate around her at an ever increasing pace until she cannot hold onto to what is hers.
Recommendation: This is not just the story of Henry or Caldonia, nor is it just the story of the slave Moses or the white slave-owner William Robbins. This story unravels the lives of each character and then weaves them together to present an unflinching and revealing look at slavery in its varied and conflicting forms. There are authors out there to be compared to. Faulkner. Morrison. But I don’t think this book is merely a combination of the two. There is a daring in this story that challenges the reader. Like the moment when Henry first slaps his own slave, this book reaches out and snaps us out of our own reverie.
For a long time slavery has been about black and white. Slaves were motivated by the desire to be free, and whites were motivated by power or greed or maybe compassion. In The Known World motivations are as disparate as the colors of skin. Each character struggles with the demands and expectations of a world defined by not only the law but also the racially charged interpretations of it. This is an eye-opening and challenging tale that is well worth exploring. It is deserved of the praise bestowed upon it.

Jones, Edward P.. The Known World, Harper Collins, New York, 2003.

Currently Reading: Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

On Deck: The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie