BOOK WORLD

Craig Nova’s “The Informer,” reviewed by Stephen Amidon

Monday, June 14, 2010

THE INFORMER

By Craig Nova

Shaye Areheart. 306 pp. $26

It is almost impossible to think about Weimar Berlin without a sense of impending doom. If ever a city was about to be plunged into historical darkness, it was the German capital circa 1930. This ill-fated metropolis is the setting for Craig Nova’s powerfully atmospheric literary thriller “The Informer.”

For Nova, Berlin is a place where corruption, betrayal and spasmodic violence run through the streets as regularly as the city’s S-Bahn trains. The heroine of his story is Gaelle, a young prostitute with a badly scarred face who uses her profession to serve as a spy for several of Berlin’s political and criminal organizations. It is a perilous life, made riskier by the fact that the city’s prostitutes are being murdered at an alarming rate. Her only confidant is Felix, a 16-year-old pimp whose youth and frailty mask a lethal cunning.

Gaelle’s life grows even more complicated when she is approached by Bruno Hauptmann, a well-tailored, champagne-sipping Nazi who asks her to be his informant. She agrees, though she soon decides to play one side of the city’s political divide against the other by peddling the same bit of information to both Hauptmann and Mani Carlson, the leader of a violent communist faction known as the Red Front Fighters. Although Mani is initially dubious of Gaelle, he soon sees her as a means of scoring points with his Moscow bosses, who are threatening him with a one-way ticket to the interrogation room over his accounting irregularities.

Meanwhile, Gaelle comes to the attention of Armina Treffen, a female detective charged with investigating the prostitute killings. In the course of her investigation, Armina is discovering the limits of everyday policing in a city where there is little separation between the personal and the political. Gaelle also attracts Karl, a hulking enforcer for Mani’s faction, who believes the damaged young woman to be his salvation. Whether Armina and Karl can keep Gaelle from drowning in the city’s various lethal tides forms the story’s dramatic crux.

While never quite reaching the giddy heights of Graham Greene or John le Carré, Nova admirably combines the virtues of serious literature with a gripping, thriller-like account of sexual and political treachery. His spare prose keeps the reader’s eyes locked on the story, even as it occasionally erupts into striking elegance. After Felix washes Gaelle’s stockings, he stares down into the tub, where the “soap bubbles broke and reminded him of the slight tick of wet lips as they opened to give a kiss.” In the novel’s unexpected but apt coda, set in 1945, a swarm of dragonflies unexpectedly descends, looking like “someone was tossing bits of a broken mirror into the air.”

Although “The Informer” contains enough suspense to keep the pages turning as if they have been caught in a stiff breeze, its central characters never feel shallow or mechanical. Armina is a particularly fine creation, a woman whose loneliness finds an eerie echo in the fate of the prostitutes whose murders she investigates. As for the disfigured Gaelle, she may at first appear to be the hooker with the proverbial golden heart, but her pain remains too vivid for her to slip into the commonplace. Only Hauptmann, the champagne-swilling Nazi dandy, lacks dimension.

In the end, it is Berlin itself that is the novel’s most memorable character. While there is no shortage of violence and dead bodies in “The Informer,” Nova mostly sculpts his story with a fine chisel, not a sledgehammer. For instance, during a street fight between communists and fascists, the weapon of choice turns out not to be guns or knives, but potatoes studded with nails.

Most memorably, the impending atrocities of war are prefigured when Armina recalls how, in the worst days of the republic’s inflationary crisis, lines formed at a veterinarian’s office as dog owners, unable to feed their pets, brought them to be killed. “It seemed to be such a poor solution,” she thinks, “killing the animals, as though everything could be solved by death.” She has no idea what other sort of final solution is about to come.

Amidon’s most recent novel is “Security.”

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Christos Tsiolkas’s razor-sharp portrait of a social circle divided over the hitting of a spoilt child expertly unpicks modern morality

Tony & Susan by Austin Wright

Michael Helm’s new novel explores what happens when two emotional exiles come together

Reviewed by Stephen Amidon

Globe and Mail Friday, Apr. 23, 2010

Our increasingly fractured world produces a wide variety of refugees. Most obvious are those desperate souls who approach the borders of prosperous countries in search of physical sanctuary. There are others, however, well-fed, safely housed people, who might not have the abject bearing of the dispossessed but nonetheless find themselves spiritually homeless.

Michael Helm’s powerful third novel explores what happens when these two types of exiles come together. Set in Toronto, it opens with a violent assault on Kim, a 28-year-old former PhD student who works as a museum guard and a volunteer for a refugee aid organization. Although she is not raped in the attack, her masked assailant does leave her with grave emotional and physical wounds: “The man with the calluses had changed her brain and she needed to change it back.”

Her recovery is complicated by the intervention of her father, Harold, a burned-out history professor who specializes in Latin American colonization. On the slimmest of evidence, he comes to believe that his daughter’s assailant is a refugee; his suspicions bring him into contact with a devout Christian social worker who provides sanctuary to undocumented immigrants. Harold comes to suspect a Colombian, Rodrigo Cantero, who may have connections with a death squad back home. But Harold has a secret past of his own, stemming from his time as a young student in Chile during the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973.

What is best about the novel is Helm’s patient evocation of his deeply wounded characters. Kim is particularly fine, a young woman who has been left spiritually homeless by her father’s childhood abandonment. While not diminishing the assault’s severity, Helm also makes it clear that this act of savagery provides her with the means to finally confront her emotionally absent father: “Her attacker has given her this way of seeing, and she hates him for the giving, for the beauty of the gift.”

It is Harold, however, who proves the novel’s most bereft soul. A man of no small charisma and ability, his is a life that is gradually shown to be a teetering scaffolding of lies: “If dissociation were a paying talent he’d own half the city.” The ghosts he is really trying to exorcize dwell in a past that he has been fleeing. His tragedy is that there is no returning to the self from which he has been exiled. He has crossed a border that has vanished.

By Stephen Amidon
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 23, 2010

A WEEK IN DECEMBER

By Sebastian Faulks

Doubleday. 392 pp. $27.95

Five pages into “A Week in December,” Sebastian Faulks’s engrossing portrait of London in 2007, the author provides an annotated guest list for the dinner party that many of his characters are scheduled to attend at the end of the book’s seven-day span. Given the length and variety of that list, it is clear that the reader, too, is in for a multi-course feast. And while a few of the dishes Faulks serves turn out to be slightly undercooked, for the most part they are the work of a chef in fine form.

Among the invited guests is the book’s most dynamic character, the surpassingly greedy hedge-fund manager John Veals, who is setting in motion a scheme that just might wreck the world’s banking system. Also on the list is R. Tranter, an embittered book critic whose biography of an obscure Victorian novelist is up for a prize to be awarded the night before the dinner. Another person holding an invitation is Gabriel Northwood, a lonely barrister preparing for his first big court case in a long while.

Farooq al-Rashid, a relish manufacturer set to be honored by the queen that week, is also slated to attend. His son Hassan will not be at the table, however, because that is the night he is set to take part in a suicide bombing in London with three other young Islamist terrorists. Spike Borowski, a newly imported Polish soccer star, will also be there, provided he is not too worn out by his game that afternoon — or by his girlfriend, whose nude photos are becoming something of an Internet sensation.

Much happens in the days leading up to the dinner. Northwood finds himself unexpectedly smitten with Jenni Fortune, a London Underground driver he is deposing as part of a wrongful death lawsuit after her train ran over someone. Veals’s wife, Vanessa, is forced to deal with the psychotic break suffered by her 16-year-old son after he smoked hydroponic marijuana scored at a pet cemetery. And Farooq finds himself in a bit of a pickle when he learns that he is meeting Prince Charles, and not the monarch for whom he has been so assiduously preparing.

The book’s most urgent story lines, however, involve Veals, the venal hedge-fund manager. He makes his play for the big score by starting a rumor about a venerable old bank. The resulting panic not only promises to line his already gilded pockets, but also threatens to create a global downturn that will result in unemployment, pension losses and even some sub-Saharan hunger.

Not that any of this bothers Veals, a remarkable creation who manages to be both compelling and repellant. “Somewhere in the passageways of John Veals’s mind,” the author tells us, “beyond the thoughts of wife, children, daily living, carnal urges, beyond the scar tissue of experience and loss, there was a creature whose heart beat only to market movements.” Despite Faulks’s big buildup, the Veals story line does not pay off for the reader quite as generously as it does for the banker himself. The author loads on too much detail about derivatives and global markets for this part of the narrative to have the thriller-like pacing it would need to achieve its lofty goal of depicting a world financial crisis in the making.

A similar problem afflicts Hassan’s story. Although the would-be terrorist is a beguiling character — the poor little rich boy who tries to build an identity from the politics of the dispossessed — there is something rather improbable about the horrific plot in which he finds himself engaged. The members of the terror cell he falls in with never become credible characters, an omission that stands out sorely in such a richly human novel.

It is a testament to the book’s manifold virtues that the fragility of these two story lines does not prevent “A Week in December” from being well worth reading. Ironically, its quieter subplots prove to be the most powerful. Gabriel’s romance with Jenni is a masterful portrait of two forlorn souls finding a connection in the urban crush, while the thawing of Vanessa’s icy, diamond-encrusted heart as she tries to help her long-neglected son is truly moving.

The book’s central virtue, however, is its grand portrait of a city where the virtual is replacing the real, where Dickensian grit is being supplanted by the pixilated glow of millions of LED screens. Faulks’s Londoners would rather inhabit online role-playing games than make human contact; they would rather relegate their favorite soccer players to fantasy teams than watch them play on the turf of the city’s famous old grounds. Nowhere is this triumph of the virtual more apparent than in the banking sector, where profit “was no longer related to growth or increase, but became self-sustaining; and in this semivirtual world, the amount of money to be made by financiers also became unhitched from normal logic.” With everybody glued so fast to their screens, it is little wonder people like Veals are stealing them blind.

True to its title, TC Boyle’s ninth collection of short stories takes us for a walk on the wild side — of suburban California. Although most of these wickedly inventive tales are set in quiet communities, they are so densely populated with savage creatures that they might as well be set in some unmapped wilderness. In Question 62, a woman tending her garden is confronted by an escaped tiger who proves far less bestial than some of her neighbours; another story features a woebegone rat who is barbecued by a juvenile delinquent.

The truly feral beasts in Boyle’s world, though, are the humans, straining against the tenuous bonds of civilisation. A depressed film editor tells a minor fib only to watch his deception spiral out of control until it threatens to demolish his life. A woman in search of some Botox develops a fixation on her surgeon, leading to a humiliating examination-room confrontation. A harried delivery man, after being caught in a mud slide, must choose between rushing his cargo of a human liver to an operating theatre or saving a trapped family.

The collection’s wildest inhabitants, however, are its children. In the superb Balto, a 12-year-old shocks everyone with her reaction after being asked to lie in court for her rich, alcoholic father. Sin Dolor, a stunning example of narrative compression, recounts the story of a boy who is born without the capacity to feel pain. In Bulletproof, a 14-year-old decides to damn the consequences when she declares her love for Jesus at a school board meeting.

The book’s only misfire is its title story, which retells the well-known tale of the 18th-century French “savage” boy who briefly became a celebrity. Written in a sombre tone at odds with the blackly satirical style of the other 12 stories, it serves only to underscore how compelling Boyle can be when he lets the beast out.

In Matinée de Septembre, one of the five stories that comprise Thomas Lynch’s collection, a professor tells her students that “sex and death…are the only subjects worth writing about”. If this is true, then Lynch is halfway there. There might not be much sex here, but there is plenty of death. Bloodsport features an embalmer who grieves for a murder victim as he prepares her body; the hero of another story is a coffin salesman mourning his wife. The professor inhabits a tale that turns out to be a reworking of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which she becomes besotted by a young Jamaican maid at a resort hotel. Apparition features the ghost of a dead marriage as a minister comes to terms with his ex-wife’s betrayal.

Lynch’s stories can crackle with grace and wit. The minister, who has written a bestseller in praise of divorce called Good Riddance, notes with surprise that “the older he got the more and younger women there were to look at”. The embalmer despairs at the “small-calibre outrage” of a young woman’s murder by a bullying husband. And Catch and Release ends with an image that is certain to snap the reader’s chin up in admiration.

Unlike Boyle, however, Lynch pulls too many punches for the collection to sustain its promise. The book’s varying tone proves unsettling. This is particularly true of Matinée de Septembre, where his effort to follow Mann’s daunting blueprint twists his prose into configurations that sound as if they’ve been poorly translated from the German: “In what remained of her two weeks at the Grand, Aisling’s infatuation with the Jamaican girl only grew more fervid and consuming.” It is the sort of mannered writing that makes you wish for a little more of that small-calibre outrage.

Point Omega opens in the summer of 2006 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where an installation called 24 Hour Psycho plays in a large, often empty gallery. The exhibit consists of Hitchcock’s seminal slasher film slowed down so that it lasts an entire day, until the “broad horror of the old gothic movie was subsumed in time”.

This proves a fitting opening to Don DeLillo’s 15th novel, where the dread unravels in devastating slow motion. As Janet Leigh steps into the shower on screen, two spectators enter, a dignified older man with a younger, casually clad companion. After a few moments, the bemused older gent stalks off, pursued by the other man. The action then switches to a house in the California desert, where the pair embark on an emotional duet that is half Samuel Beckett, half Newsnight. The older of the two is the home’s owner, Richard Elster, “a defence intellectual” who played a key role in planning the Iraq War. His guest is Jim Finley, a documentary film-maker whose sole film is about the comedian Jerry Lewis. Finley is ­trying to convince Elster to appear in a documentary about his involvement in the Iraq invasion, much as the famed film-maker Errol Morris did with Vietnam war ­architect Robert McNamara in The Fog of War.

Elster, a bone-dry intellectual who has written a scholarly essay about the etymology of the word “rendition”, proves an elusive prey. “A deathbed conversion,” he scolds Finley when asked to go before camera. “This is what you want. The foolishness, the vanity of the intellectual. The blind vanity, the worship of power. Forgive me, absolve me.”

Gradually, however, Elster opens up off screen. “A great power has to act,” he says in self-justification. “We were struck hard. We need to retake the future.” He explains, in a chilling echo of the real instigators of the assault on Iraq, that “lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or preparation for war that can’t be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability”.
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Elster is no Rumsfeldian stick figure, however. There is pain beneath the pomposity. However brash and self-assured he may at times seem, there is clearly a deep unease gnawing at him, a reason why he has fled to this harsh, remote terrain. “Time falling away. That’s what I feel here…time becoming slowly older.” The featureless desert is his “omega point”, a black hole where he might pass completely out of being and, ­conceivably, move beyond the pain and guilt of the war he helped wage. “We want to be the dead matter we used to be,” he claims against the bleak backdrop. “We’re the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.”

Elster’s quest for self-nullification is forestalled by the arrival of his daughter Jessie, an unemployed woman in her mid-twenties who is fleeing a relationship with a domineering boyfriend back in New York. She is a strange girl, edgeless and almost silent. “She wasn’t a child who needed imaginary friends,” her father explains. “She was imaginary to herself.”

Finley finds himself attracted to her, but before he can make a move, the real reason for her visit becomes apparent in a startling turn of events. Finley and Elster are left baffled and undermined. The film shoot is over before it even began. All they can do is pack their bags and return to civilisation. “The story was here,” Finley finally understands, “not in Iraq or in Washington, and we were leaving it behind and taking it with us, both.”

While some may find Point Omega’s brevity and slow pace ­off-putting, the patient reader will uncover a devastating vein of ­disquiet running beneath its tomb-cool surface. As in his recent novel Falling Man, which dealt with the attacks of 9/11, DeLillo chooses to take an oblique approach to a topic that might be blinding if viewed straight on. Like a hidden picture in a bland canvas, Elster’s desolation is difficult to make out at first. Once lodged in the mind, however, it is impossible to forget.