“When you live in a house of mirrors, the only way to stay alive is to believe that every reflection is real.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (MAR 18, 2014)

The Cairo Affair takes place in Egypt and Libya during 2011 with flashbacks to Serbia in 1991. It is set during the period when the regimes of dictators Hosni Mubarek, Egyptian President and military commander from 1981 to 2011, and Muammar Gaddafi, a Libyan revolutionary and the de facto ruler of Libya for 42 years, came to a violent end. The revolutionary events of the “Arab Spring” brought to conclusion various repressive Arab governments. The “Arab Spring” is widely believed to have been instigated by dissatisfaction with the rule of local governments, though some have speculated that wide gaps in income levels may have had a hand as well. Numerous factors led to the protests, including issues such as dictatorship or absolute monarchy, human rights violations, political corruption, (demonstrated by Wikileaks’ diplomatic cables), extreme poverty, and a large percentage of educated, jobless and dissatisfied youth. The storyline of  The Cairo Affair, takes place around the above events…and the events are often current, which makes this novel more interesting.

FLASHBACK: It is September 20, 1991, Sophie and Emmett Kohl are on on their honeymoon and madly in love. “Enthusiasm, imagination and commitment” are the qualities she most admires in her spouse. The newlywed couple choose to travel through Eastern Europe for a holiday. From their TVs at Harvard they’d watched the crumbling of the USSR with excitement. At age 22, Emmett has been to Europe previously, but Sophie has never traveled there. She longs to see Paris, the left bank cafes and the wonderful museums. Emmett tells her that they should go to places where “history is happening.” He wants to take a detour from the tourist attractions of Western Europe and travel to Eastern Europe. He tells Sophie that they would travel “the road less taken”…and she agrees.

They wait until September to make the trip so as to avoid the summer heat and the tourists. After four days in Vienna, where they wander down the broad avenues with their wedding cake buildings and museums, they visit the Sacher, the Stephansdom and the Kunsthalle and the cafes Central and Hofburg. Emmett comments that the city reminds him of Graham Greene’s 1949 British film noir, “The Thin Man.” On the fifth day they board a train to Prague. The couple moves on to Budapest and then they make an unexpected detour to Yugoslavia.

Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the dictator of Yugoslavia died in 1980, leaving the country, a socialist federation, without cohesive leadership. In March and April 1981, a student protest in Pristina, the capital of the then Yugoslav and Serbian province of Kosovo, led to widespread protests by the Kosovo Albanians demanding more autonomy within the Yugoslav federation. After Tito’s death in 1980, tensions between the Yugoslav republics emerged, and in 1991 the country disintegrated and went into a series of brutal wars that lasted the rest of the decade.

It is at this time of enormous tension when Emmett and Sophia choose to visit, knowing full well the dangerous situation in the country. They wind up in the city of Novi Sad where they become involved with an exuberant bunch of 20-something locals who insist that the American couple accompany them to a nearby disco. All their newly made friends are from Vojvodina, the city-state where Novi Sad is located. One such “friend” slams  “Miloševi?, took away our political autonomy. Ours and Kosovo’s. It stinks!” It is in a bar, late at night, when they meet Zora Balasevic, an attractive, hard looking woman in her 40s, who overwhelms the couple by discussing, (a one-sided conversation), Serbian history. “We are happy – you see? – to get rid of the Slovenes, but Croats want to steal our coast. Who pay for these beaches? (sic). Bosnia is next. There will be fire…”

FLASH FORWARD: It is winter 2011. Five politically active Libyan exiles have seemingly vanished from the face of the earth at the same time. Jibral Aziz, is a CIA agent working out of Langley and Cairo, and, with increasing frequency, over the border to Libya. He is a young Libyan American whose father was executed by the Gadhafi regime. Aziz is in Cairo under nonofficial cover, although he meets occasionally with Harry Wolcott, head of CIA activities in Egypt. Awhile back Aziz had concocted a plan, “Stumbler,” whose purpose was to have the US literally high-jack the revolution in Libya, using the exiles and revolutionaries as their front, (sound familiar?). The plan had the CIA turning a popular revolution into a CIA coup, thus giving the CIA complete control over the country’s development…. and, of course, OIL! Oil reserves in Libya are the largest in Africa and the fifth largest in the world. For a variety of reasons, “Stumbler was tabled.” So when it appears someone else has obtained a copy of the blueprints, Aziz alone knows the danger it represents as the players converge on the city of Cairo.

In the winter of 2011, Sophie and Emmett Kohl are stationed in Hungary where Emmet’s official title is “deputy consul.” They had worked/lived in Cairo before the transfer. Sophie, however, doesn’t really have “a life.” She is a 42 year-old lady of leisure, who graduated with honors from Harvard. She has tea with the wives of other diplomats, makes small talk at embassy cocktail parties, has her nails and hair done…and is bored out of her mind. On the evening of March 2, 2011 she meets her husband at a fancy restaurant and proceeds to tell him that she has been having an affair with his boss, Stan Bertolli, who is still in Cairo. She believes she loves him and he has certainly expressed his love for her.

Emmett, in a state of anger and betrayal, confides a long kept secret that had been bothering him. He had met, just once, with the infamous Zora Balasevic, from Serbian days. She is now a spy at the Serbian embassy in Cairo and she attempts to recruit him by blackmailing him. He right out refuses and so Zora backs-off. After the main course at dinner, a thug pops into the restaurant and shoots Emmett in the head in front of his disbelieving wife!

In shock, Sophie flees to Cairo and into Stan’s arms. She doesn’t know why the murder happened or who the perpetrator is. Stan will help her, she thinks. And she is in no shape to return to Massachusetts for Emmett’s funeral. Determined to find out why her husband was assassinated, she follows a trail that leads to the American Embassy in a tumultuous Cairo; to the revolution under way in neighboring Libya; to Langley, Virginia; and to her own ill-fated honeymoon in Eastern Europe.

There are many characters in this story, most with hidden identities, multiple roles, and many betrayals which unravel slowly but inevitably as we view events from several characters’ viewpoints. The fact that the narrative unfolds with a current events background makes this novel appear to be real…and perhaps some of it is. And the portrait the author paints of Cairo really brings the city to life with its colors, smells, people, etc.

Olen Steinhauer’s The Cairo Affair is a complex, well fleshed-out story of the Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, the CIA, a marriage and an affair, “that leaves the reader with the unsettling feeling that, despite all the information won, lost, and put to use, the world of intelligence is no stronger than the fragile, fallible humans who navigate it.” Here allegiances are never clear and outcomes are never guaranteed.

I highly recommend The Cairo Affair…especially for those readers who are fans of Eric Ambler and John le Carré.

NOTE:  There are no “spoilers” here. The review information takes place in the first few chapters of the novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Minotaur Books (March 18, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Olen Steinhauer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Tourist The Nearest Exit

Bibliography:

Cold War Eastern Europe Series:

• The Bridge of Sighs (2003)
• The Confession (2004)
• 36 Yalta Boulevard (aka The Vienna Assignment) (2005)
• Liberation Movements (aka The Istanbul Variations) (2006)
• Victory Square (2007)
• The Cairo Affair (March 2014)

Milo Weaver trilogy:

• The Tourist (2009)
• The Nearest Exit (2010)
• An American Spy (2012)

“During the final days of the occupation, there was an American woman in Haiti, a photojournalist — blonde, young, infuriating — and she became Thomas Harrington’s obsession.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman (JAN 3, 2014)

You don’t need to know much about Haitian, Croatian or Turkish politics to fully appreciate The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, but it helps. It also helps to surrender to the journey – a journey that spans over 700 pages – because immediate answers will not be forthcoming.

This is a big book in every sense of the word: big in breadth, in ideas, in audacity. You will lose your heart to it and end up shaking your head in awe and admiration. And along the way, you will learn something about the shadowy world of politics and espionage, the hypocrisy of religion, and the lengths that the players go to keep their sense of identity – their very soul – from fragmenting.

So what IS it about? That’s not an easy question to tackle. The eponymous woman of the title is Dottie Chambers, the hypnotic and damaged daughter of the elite spy Steven Chambers – surely one of the most screwed up characters in contemporary literature. As a young boy, Steven witnessed the atrocities of Tito’s Muslim partisans against his own father, and he came to age with a zeal to right the wrongs…eventually pulling Dottie into his malignant orbit.

That is all I intend to say about the plot, which spans five decades, many countries, and a wide range of themes. The novel consists of five separate books, some short, some long, a catalog-of-sorts of 20th century atrocities and the loss of not only the individual soul, but our collective soul as well. Mr. Shacochis has choreographed a spellbinder, with hints (depending on where you are in the book) of David Mitchell, John Le Carre, Ernest Hemingway, and others…while keeping the narrative distinctly his.

The themes this author tackles go right to the heart of identity and destiny. “We choose the lies in which we participate and in choosing, define ourselves and our actions for a very long time,” he writes at one point. In other passage, we are first introduced to Steven with these words: {Steven would be} “introduced in the most indelible fashion to his destiny, the spiritual map that guides each person finally to the door of the cage that contains his soul, and in his hand a key that will turn the lock, or the wrong key, or no key at all.”

The questions he asks are universal: how do you change back if your former self no longer interlocks cleanly with the shape you have assumed? What happens when you become an actor in a theater without walls or boundaries or audiences? Where is the thin wall of separation between “patriotism and hatred, love and violence, ideology and facts, judgment and passion, intellect and emotion, duty and zealotry, hope and certainty, confidence and hubris, power and fury…” And when do we have the right to challenge and to reclaim our own souls before it’s too late?

This is an amazing book, a true Magnus opus, a story of who we are and how we came to be that way. Yet at its epicenter, Dottie and the two men who love her – her unhealthy father and the book’s moral core, Green Beret Evelle Burnette – who, in their own way, battle for her very soul.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 63 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (September 3, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Bob Shacochis
EXTRAS:	Interview and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob Zoet by David Mitchell

Bibliography:

• Easy in the Islands (1985)
• The Next New World (1990)
• Swimming in the Volcano (1993)
• The Woman Who Lost Her Soul (September 2013)

Nonfiction:

• Drinking, Smoking and Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times (1994)
• Domesticity: A Gastronomic Interpretation of Love (1994;2013)
• The Immaculate Invasion (1999)

” ‘Hannah Elizabeth Payne, having been found guilty of the crime of murder in the second degree, I hereby sentence you to undergo melachoming by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, to spend thirty days in the Chrome ward of the Crawford State Prison and to remain a Red for a period of sixteen years.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (OCT 6, 2011)

Hannah Payne is twenty-six years old and Red, with a capital R, her badge of shame. Her skin has been “melachromed” by the State for her crime of abortion, and for not naming the abortionist and not identifying the father, the celebrated pastor and TV (“vid”) evangelist, Aidan Dale, who is now the nation’s “Secretary of Faith.” Her sentence is thirty days confinement, and then sixteen years in the community as a Red, where she will be constantly ostracized and persecuted.

Other criminals of the same or different color (depending on the crime) are wandering through the prison of life, beyond the walls of crowded cells (this is the State’s answer for overcrowding), and many don’t survive — the Blue child molesters have especially low survival rates. Hannah is deeply in love with the married Aiden, and refuses to upbraid him or the doctor who was kind and tender to her. She is also a product of her religious upbringing, and when she wakes up Red, she concedes that she deserves this punishment.

Many dystopian novels are noir and bleak -— you can just hear Mahler’s symphonies in your imagination -— the lost world of childhood, the yearning of fulfillment, life’s despair and discord. Therefore, Jordan’s more insistent, high-strung tone in reimagining a liberal interpretation of The Scarlett Letter, Hawthorne’s gothic melodrama, was unexpected. Her exuberance is like a lit match that never goes out. It has a pumping action, much like Dennis Lehane’s in his Kenzie and Gennaro series.

It also conforms to the margins of conventional genre more than the open-endedness of literature; Hannah is portrayed as a solid, misunderstood hero, and the demarcation of villain/hero-martyr is obvious and continuous with the secondary characters as well, except for a surprising and complex French radical named Simone, the most intriguing character in this tale. Much of the time, Hannah is on the lam with her newfound Red friend, Kayla, and heartily braves and overcomes dangerous hurdles at a page-turning glee.

In this near-future world, Roe v Wade has been overturned, and most of the fifty states have outlawed abortion. The government métier is fundamental New Testament, and is ruthless and unforgiving in its Kingdom-minded law. From reading this book, it appears that abortion is the primary preoccupation of the militant State, and that Aidan Dale is the only celebrity on the vid. Much of the novel takes place in the North Dallas area, where Jordan partly grew up. She knows the ingrained and forceful pieties of the area (the actual geographical area of Roe v Wade), and seems to draw on them. She started this book even before Mudbound, and it is left to wonder if she was shaking loose some demons from the Texas Red Oaks.

This is a commercial novel, unlike Mudbound, with a knowing arc and slender, reductive characters. She has a gift for thrumming action, even if it tends toward didacticism and a tidy outcome. This isn’t a novel that provokes thinking, as Jordan does much of the thinking for the reader, but it does provide action and visceral thrills and some poetic lyricism amidst the many indictments against religious zealots.

There is an exquisitely transcendent scene about two-thirds through, where a quietness and stillness pervades for a few pages, and Hannah reaches a key turning point in her life, and expresses it in a way that I hope others won’t fail to appreciate. It may seem lurid at face value, or even gratuitous, but it is anything but —- rather, it is sublime in its implication. This was the high point of refinement in this not typically nuanced novel.

Twists and turns are relentless and exciting, although it is obvious, in this world of morally challenged monkeys running the State, who will prevail. Ambiguity is not a paramount trait in this heavy-handed story with potboiler themes. It is comfort food—like popcorn with a little too much butter, and addictive. The author will keep you fastened till the end, because Jordan’s thrall with her characters and exultance with her story is contagious and highly spirited.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 351 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Hillary Jordan
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Mudbound by Hilary Jordan

Bibliography:

• Mudbound (2008)
• When She Woke (2011)

“Homeland security is a myth…. It’s a bedtime story we tell our people to make them feel safe at night. Despite all our best efforts and all our billions spent, the United States is largely indefensible.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JUL 25, 2011)

As Daniel Silva’s Portrait of a Spy opens, art restorer and master spy Gabriel Allon and his wife, Chiara, are living quietly in a cottage by the sea. Silva sets the stage with a series of events that are eerily familiar: Countries all over the world are “teetering on the brink of fiscal and monetary disaster;” Europe is having difficulty absorbing “an endless tide of Muslim immigrants;” and Bin Laden is dead, but others are scrambling to take his place. Government leaders in America and on the Continent are desperate to identify and thwart the new masterminds of terror.

All of this should not be Gabriel Allon’s problem, since he is no longer an agent of Israeli intelligence. However, Gabriel happens to be in London when he learns that two suicide bombers have struck, one in Paris and the other in Copenhagen. Later, Gabriel is strolling through Covent Garden when he spots a man who arouses his suspicions. Should he alert the police or take out this individual on his own? A series of unexpected events ensue that will bring Gabriel’s brief retirement to an abrupt end. He becomes a key player in a complex plot–involving high finance, a valuable painting, and a beautiful heiress–to destroy the new Bin Laden and his bloodthirsty cohorts. Allon will clash not just with his natural enemies but also with certain American politicians and their subordinates whose short-sighted and self-serving attitudes he finds repugnant.

Portrait of a Spy is an intricate, powerful, well-researched, and engrossing tale of deception, betrayal, and self-sacrifice. The most memorable character is thirty-three year old Nadia al-Bakari, a savvy businesswoman who is highly intelligent, secretive, and one of the richest women in the world. Her late father was a known supporter of terror networks. Will she follow in his footsteps or choose a different path? Silva brings back many of Allon’s comrades, including the amusing Julian Isherwood, an aging but still sharp-tongued Ari Shamron, and art curator/CIA operative, Sarah Bancroft.

The author choreographs his story perfectly and manages an extremely large cast with consummate skill. The sharp and clever dialogue, meaningful themes (including a description of how women are demeaned and manual laborers are exploited in Saudi Arabia and Dubai), as well as the nicely staged action sequences all combine to make this one of the most entertaining espionage thrillers of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 446 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper; First Edition edition (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Daniel Silva
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Rembrandt Affair Moscow Rules The Prince of Fire A Death in Vienna

Bibliography:

• The Unlikely Spy (1996)

Michael Osbourne series:

• The Mark of the Assassin (1998)
• The Marching Season (1999)

Gabriel Allon series:

• The Kill Artist (2000)
• The English Assassin (2002)
• The Confessor (2003)
• A Death in Vienna (2004)
• Prince of Fire (2005)
• The Messenger (2006)
• The Secret Servant (2007)
• Moscow Rules (2008)
• The Defector (2009)
• The Rembrandt Affair (2010)
• Portrait of a Spy (2011)
• The Fallen Angel (2012)
• The English Girl (July 2013)

“They say that everybody has their reasons, but it’s a mystery to me why you would destroy lives as freely as you do. There are so many other choices available to you. Is it just the thrill of it, the sense of power? Or are you so loyal to your country, are you such a patriot, that it short-circuits your [sense of] decency?”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (MAR 15, 2011)

Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and John Cairncross, who studied at Cambridge in the 1930s, were recruited by Moscow Center to act as Soviet agents. They eventually rose to positions of prominence in such organizations as the British Foreign Office and the Secret Intelligence Service (M16). Over the years, they passed “vast numbers of classified documents to their handlers.” Charles Cumming, in The Trinity Six, suggests the existence of a sixth man whose identity was never made public. What if this individual survived decades after the other five passed away and decided that the time has come to reveal what he knows?

Forty-three year old Dr. Sam Gaddis is a British scholar, author, and senior lecturer in Russian history at University College in London. As the story opens, Gaddis is interviewing a smarmy male nurse named Calvin Somers. Sam agrees to pay Somers three thousand pounds for potentially explosive information about a former patient named Edward Crane, who was admitted to St. Mary’s Paddington Hospital in 1992. Crane purportedly died of pancreatic cancer, but the situation, it turns out, was not as straightforward as it appeared. It seems that certain governmental officials perpetrated an elaborate ruse that would have major consequences for years to come.

Gaddis, who is already deeply in debt, learns that he owes over twenty-thousand pounds in back taxes. In addition, his ex-wife, Natasha, is demanding increased child support for their daughter. He decides to pitch an idea for a new book that, he hopes, will earn him a sizeable advance. The manuscript would need to have commercial possibilities, or as his literary agent says, “I’m talking cover of the Daily Mail. I’m talking scoop.” As luck would have it, Sam’s close friend, journalist Charlotte Berg, drops a bombshell after a night of heavy drinking: “What if I told you there was a sixth Cambridge spy who had never been unmasked?” She goes on: “I’m talking about a legendary KGB spy…every bit as dangerous and as influential as Maclean and Philby.” Sam is eager to follow up, especially since an attractive woman named Holly Levette is offering Sam the papers of her late mother, who was working on a history of the KGB before she died. Perhaps he can find enough material from his various sources to earn the cash that he so desperately needs. His inquiries lead him to a nonagenarian in a nursing home, a physician in Berlin, a widow in Moscow, and a former British spy in New Zealand. Before this sordid case comes to a close, Sam discovers a secret that, if it became public, could ” ‘rock London and Moscow to their foundations.’ ”

The Trinity Six is multifaceted tale of deception, greed, and betrayal. Realpolitik—the theory that leaders focus more on considerations of power than they do on ideals, morals, or principles—is at the heart of the novel. Gaddis watches in horror as, one by one, anyone who knows too much is eliminated; he wonders if learning the truth is worth sacrificing his life. Yet, he finds it difficult to let go. This investigation has become personal, and Sam recklessly risks everything to get to the bottom of what turns out to be a shocking cover-up.

Cumming is a talented writer with an impressive knowledge of espionage;  The Trinity Six has the ring of authenticity. What keeps it from being an unqualified success is its tendency to be too talky and didactic. Often the characters make speeches instead of conversing naturally. Sam is likeable enough, but he is a bland and naïve protagonist who stumbles around like a bull in a china shop; the fact that he manages to stay alive is nothing short of miraculous. The author includes the usual espionage trappings, such as electronic eavesdropping, forged passports, and surveillance operations. There is a fair amount of violence which, before long, loses its impact. All in all, this is a serviceable, but not outstanding, work of fiction. It reinforces what most of know already—that governments are too often controlled by self-serving, ruthless, and amoral politicians. It is not a pretty picture.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	St. Martin’s Press; First Edition edition (March 15, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Charles Cumming
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Spy By Nature

Bibliography:

• A Spy By Nature (1999; July 2007 in US)
• The Hidden Man (2003)
• The Spanish Game (2006; November 2008 in US) *
• Typhoon (2008; October 2009 in US)
• Trinity Six (March 2011)

* Follow on to A Spy By Nature

“And when he wakes from dreaming of her, is it not the same for him? The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against every morning…Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 14, 2011)

Incalculable grief cleaves to profound love in this elaborate, helical tapestry of a besieged people in postwar Freetown, Sierra Leone. Interlacing two primary periods of violent upheaval, author Aminatta Forna renders a scarred nation of people with astonishing grace and poise–an unforgettable portrait of open wounds and closed mouths, of broken hearts and fractured spirits, woven into a stunning evocation of recurrence and redemption, loss and tender reconciliation. Forna mines a filament of hope from resigned fatalism, from the devastation of a civil war that claimed 50,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people. Those that survived felt hollowed out, living with an uneasy peace.

Over 99% of people suffered from unrelieved post-traumatic stress disorder, and those that survived often hid shameful secrets of forced betrayal. Here you have children, now adults, trying to cope after their brutal coercion with rebel soldiers. They are living with the aftermath of “nothing left to lose.” If you can imagine an unspeakable atrocity, it was likely executed. Blood on the hands of the people who remain seep into the pores of the newly arrived.

Three principal characters form the locus of this story–a psychologist, a surgeon, and an academic. The story goes through seamless temporal shifts–from 1969, a period of unrest following a military coup–to 2001, following ten years of civil war begun in 1991.

Adrian Lockheart is a British psychologist on sabbatical from his failing marriage to accept a (second) post in Freetown. He is compassionate and dogged in his pursuit to treat the population of mentally disturbed and traumatized citizens, to help them find hope and resolve, yet he feels emotionally dislocated from his own family at home.

“The truth is that since arriving here his life has seemed more charged with meaning than it ever had in London. Here the boundaries are limitless, no horizon, no sky. He can feel his emotions, solid and weighty, like stones in the palm of his hands.”

Adrian treats tortured men and women in the fallout of war, finding a particularly poignant interest in Agnes, a woman who is suffering from a fugue disorder. He contends that the endless miles she compulsively roams on foot (and subsequently forgets) indicate a search for something meaningful from the ruins of war. He believes she is going toward somewhere, a place he determines to find out.

Adrian’s most prominent patient is the unreliable narrator, Elias Cole, an elderly, retired history professor dying of pulmonary disease. In this city of silence, Elias is compelled to tell his story, his confession, to Adrian. It begins in 1969, when Elias first laid eyes on Saffia Kamara, a charming and comely botanist married to the gregarious, fearless Julius, an academic at the university.

“People are wrong when they talk of love at first sight. It is neither love nor lust. No. As she walks away from you, what you feel is loss. A premonition of loss.”

Julius, Elias, and Saffia embark on a friendship that inextricably points to the destiny of the next generation. The military coups of the late 60’s followed Sierra Leon’s hard-won independence from the British colonial rule. Political unrest led to widespread paranoia, which in turn led to wobbly allegiances. Elias’s confession to Adrian is the rallying point, which heightens all the other narratives. Adrian’s probing of Elias reaches to encounters outside of the hospital, and will alter the course of his life, and too of the story.

Lastly, there is Kai Manseray, a talented, young orthopedic surgeon, a tireless and tormented man plagued by chronic insomnia and a suppressed and devastating history. Kai chose to stay and help the damaged and impoverished, rather than abscond two years ago with his best friend, Tejani. He is torn between his loyalties in Sierra Leone and his desire for a more elite station in the States. The woman he loved has gone, the city ravaged, the people embattled, but his little cousin, Abass, and the patients who need him keep him anchored. He has secrets that he won’t share with anyone, that threaten to undo him in the operating theater.

As the story highlights the contrast of their professions, Kai and Adrian form a tenuous bond of friendship. Kai’s achievements are measurable–stitching, sewing, patching, cutting, and saving lives. Adrian, however, can’t measure his patients’ success with an X-ray or point to approximated edges of a wound. Psychotherapy is a process of encounters, wending your way through the dark channels of a person’s interior and facilitating change through conversation. Kai and Adrian’s bond is ultimately the most hypnotic, with consequences encroaching on the dark side of hope.

Forna constructs a mesmerizing collision of forces and people that slowly propel the reader toward a towering climax. This story is for the committed reader, the patient literature lover who will undertake many hours of dedication for the inevitable reward. Think of a blank canvas, and every sentence as a mindful brushstroke, a bloom on the page. It takes a while for the picture to materialize. The writing is carefully crafted, and yet imperceptibly so, not in the least self-conscious. She is steadily augmenting, fuller and deeper, contrasting the light and the darkness, capturing nature and sound. Even her secondary and tertiary characters are wrought with polish and care.The story’s leisurely pace builds its emotional cathedral one stone at a time; at about the halfway point, it becomes riveting and impossible to turn away.

This is a personal and natal undertaking for Forna, whose father, Dr. Mohamed Forna, was a dissident in Sierra Leona and was killed on trumped up charges when she was only eleven-years-old. Her non-fiction book, The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest, is the story of her search for the truth of that harrowing time. She continues her exploration of healing and recovery in this deeply researched and ambitious novel.

There are coincidences in The Memory of Love that nevertheless do not disturb the beauty or the impact of the story. In lesser hands, this may have come across as artifice. However, Forna’s characters and themes are ultimately grounded, and the patterns that emerge from the disparate stories–the unguarded moments, the link of love that ties all the characters together–transcend her intention. The potency of storytelling and the refrain of love in the aftermath of tragedy is evident and sublime in her fluent prose.

“There exists, somewhere, a scale for love invented by one of his [Adrian’s] profession…And there are others still who say love is but a beautiful form of madness.”

The injured voices of her characters mesh into a voice of hope and holding on, to a startling story of redemption. At various intervals, the lyrics of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” drift onto the page. It sang, I sang.

“Well, they tell me there’s a pie up in the sky…The harder they come, the harder they fall.”

Love endures. One and all.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (January 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Aminatta Forna
EXTRAS:	Diane Rehm show interview with Aminatta Forma
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A River Called Time by Mia Couto

Bibliography:

• The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002)
• Ancestor Stones (2006)
• The Memory of Love (2010; January 2011 in US) Commonwealth Prize

Nonfiction:

• The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest (2002)

“The first rule of politics is ‘Do unto others before they do unto you.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (JAN 25, 2011)

It was during the 2008 presidential race that author Christopher Buckley’s delightful novel, Supreme Courtship, was released. Presciently, in the book, he had pitted two characters against each other: a senator who had run for president, served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, and who “just couldn’t shut up,” against a “glasses-wearing, gun-toting television hottie.” Months after the novel was conceived, Governor Sarah Palin turned out to be a nominee for Vice President running against then Senator Joe Biden. It truly was a case of life imitating fiction, Buckely later recalled in an interview. “I am announcing my retirement from satire,” he joked.

This “anything can happen here, it’s Washington” attitude also permeates a much buzzed about new novel, O, by a Washington insider who prefers to remain anonymous. Press materials about the author state merely: “The author is someone who has been in the room with Barack Obama and knows his world intimately.” This might indeed be the case, but that intimate knowledge of the president’s world unfortunately does not translate well on to the page. Even if the book promises to give us a close look at what the President—referred in the book just as “O”—is thinking, there is not much here that is new. The cool, collected temperament, the slight air of haughtiness, the “no-drama” Obama, even the smoking habit—are all old stomping grounds for avid political junkies.

O: A Presidential Novel is set mostly in the immediate future and is about the 2012 presidential campaign. As the novel opens, O’s campaign manager, Stru Trask has to abruptly quit after he’s caught in an inappropriate relationship with a high school senior—she works for an escort service Trask patronizes. Enter Cal Regan, the new campaign manager, an old Chicago hand, who forms the central glue in the novel. For a while, Cal himself is going out with a young journalist, Maddy Cohan, but she breaks off the relationship in the interest of objectivity after she is assigned to work on the campaign trail.

O’s opponent is not The Barracuda, as he describes Sarah Palin, but Tom “Terrific” Morrison. While readers might speculate about which real life person each character in the book most closely relates to, there’s probably not an equivalent for Tom Morrison out there. He seems to be a cross between General Colin Powell and Governor Mitt Romney.

Among the most recognizable characters in the book is Bianca Stefani, publisher of the online magazine Stefani Report, who appears to be modeled after Arianna Huffington. It is this “Stefani Report” that breaks a crucial story during the campaign trail—potentially threatening to disgrace Cal Regan by showing him to be an inept campaign manager.

The Morrison campaign is not without troubles of its own. Channing-Mills, a company for which Morrison once worked as CEO, is under investigation by the FBI for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. And Morrison just might have his fingers dirty.

As the story chugs along, the author peppers the novel with truisms about Washington but many of them ring trite. “Paradoxes threatened to suffocate every initiative,” the author writes. “Everything mattered and nothing mattered. Everything was urgent and nothing had priority. Hurry up! Not so fast!”

The story’s characters are also often prone to immature impulses. It is hard to believe for example, that on the eve of the Democractic Convention, O’s campaign manager would get wildly drunk and sleep with a young press aide, only to recall none of it the next morning. Then there’s Walter Lafontaine, a young man who pins his hopes on “O” during the 2008 campaign but has since been rebuffed by the administration. Walter’s reaction to the administration’s indifference comes across as adolescent petulance rather than the disappointment of a mature adult.

Even if O doesn’t quite live up to its promise or offer any profound political insights, it finally is a breezy tale—one that hardcore political junkies might enjoy. As the novel reaches the end, right up to the eve of Election Day, we watch as the pace picks up, and as each campaign has the potential to be derailed by one misplaced comment or one faulty judgment.

As for the president’s re-election campaign, by the time the curtain falls down on O, the race has become a dead heat, all because a certain rich man decided to drop a precious nugget of information at an inopportune moment. It might sound implausible that such huge outcomes can turn on so little but then again, this is Washington. As Christopher Buckley once pointed out, stranger things have happened here.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (January 25, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Anonymous
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More for political junkies: Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley Put a Lid on It by Donald E. Westlake

Bibliography:

• O: A Presidential Novel (January 2011)

“Why would I want to be the leader of a party of such assholes?” (John McCain)

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (JAN 25, 2011)

If Hollywood Central Casting were asked to put together a group of actors with the most monstrous egos on the face of the planet, they could not have done a better job than the two national parties did in the last election.

So forget about everything you know about McCain and Palin, Clinton and Obama, Edwards and Giuliani. The truth is actually worse. Far worse. Game Change goes ahead and deliciously details all the backbiting, sex, lies, and self-destructions of the most dissected presidential campaign in history. It’s jaw-dropping, gripping, and guaranteed to keep you reading late into the night. Here are just a few of the revelations:

SARAH PALIN was the most colossally unprepared candidate ever to grace the national arena. “She couldn’t explain why North and South Korea were separate nations. She didn’t know what the Fed did. Asked who attacked America on 9/11, she suggested several times it was Saddam Hussein.” And her mental state was so precarious that at one point, John McCain actually had his doctor observe her.

JOHN EDWARDS was such a blowhard egotist that he angled for a position as VP or Attorney General, all the while knowing that Rielle Hunter was eight months pregnant and the story could break at any time.

JOHN MCCAIN was so disengaged and shoot-from-the-hip in style that GEORGE BUSH wondered about his ability to lead the nation. He vetted Palin for the second most important job in the nation in under 72 hours and barely knew her. Oh, and when he wanted to relax? He’d watch the infamous YouTube posting of John Edwards preening to the sounds of I Feel Pretty.

HILLARY CLINTON was barely able to control her husband and his intemperate telephonic and in-person outbursts. Oh, and that speech she delivered at the convention anointing Obama? Bill rewrote it behind her back just hours before she was supposed to deliver it.

The authors, Heilemann and Halperin reveal it all in this spicy smorgasbord: the friction between Obama and his garrulous vice presidential pick…Obama’s own tendency toward conceit and coldness…Hillary’s initial rejection of Obama’s Secretary of State offer…the perilous state of the marriage of John and Elizabeth Edwards. It’s so compulsively readable that I finished 400 pages in just two days. This is truly “must read” for anyone interested in politics.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 689 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (October 26, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Heilemann Mark Halperin
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our other  review of: Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

Bibliography:

• Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (January 2010)

“I will be sorry to leave this life, as soon I must. It is so full of wonder, as well as horror. A surprise around every corner and the pace is hotting up.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (OCT 15, 2010)

Two things about British novelist Fay Weldon: she will always be controversial and she will always be relevant. Known primarily as an author of female-centered books, Weldon –who just turned 79, by the way, worked in advertising at one point in her career, and she also wrote the screenplay for the 1980 version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In 1998, Weldon, called a feminist novelist for decades, came under fire for her comments on the subject of rape. In 2001 Weldon once again became the subject of controversy with her novel The Bulgari Connection when it was revealed that she’d been paid 18,000 pounds to quote the jeweler at least 12 times. How’s that for product placement? After some initial waffling came Weldon’s great get stuffed response: “Well they never give me the Booker Prize anyway.”

Chalcot Crescent--Weldon’s 29th novel (her 30th if you count Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen) is a bit of a change of pace. Weldon’s characters are predominantly females struggling to survive in a male dominated society, and while these women should, of course band together to form a cohesive, formidable alliance, they more often than not devolve into rivalry and squabbling as they battle over men–the so-called spoils. In Chalcot Crescent, Weldon’s world of 2013 offers a tableau of a slightly different sort. Yes men still rule, but it’s the faceless sinister monolithic government–the true enemy–and the ultimate patriarchal society–in charge of a world that’s gone horribly and believably awry. Is this science fiction? Perhaps–although I think the world of Chalcot Crescent is too close to the truth for that. Instead it’s the sort of Weldon-dabbling we see in the futuristic The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) and the alternative realities of Mantrapped (2004).

Weldon tells the reader that this book is the story of her lost sister “set in an alternative universe that mirrors our own.” With Weldon’s characteristic humour, the novel’s protagonist, Frances now aged 80, is a once-successful, now-penniless writer living in Chalcot Crescent while her loser sister, Fay–a writer of cookbooks has hightailed it to back to New Zealand. Holed up in her Chalcot Crescent home, surrounded by foreclosures, Frances hides from the bailiffs who are about to turf her out of her house and presumably onto the street. Trapped inside her home, she describes a world that’s gone to hell:

“Then came the Labour Government of 1997 and the Consumer Decade–as it is now called–and by 2007 the house next door to me sold for £1.85 million. Then came the Shock of 2008, the Crunch of 2009-11–when house prices plummeted and still no-one was buying–then the brief recovery of 2012, when at least properties began to change hands again, though our friendly European neighbours became less friendly, the US embraced protectionism and the rest of the world had no choice but to follow. And then came the Bite, which is now, and with it a coalition and thoroughly dirigiste government which keeps its motives and actions very much to itself. And though a few major figures in the financial world went to prison, the nomenklatura still ride the middle lanes, have their mortgages paid for them and do very well, thank you. The rest of us are presumably moving to the outskirts: fifty years on and we are back to where we began. I reckon I had the best of it.”

With the economy in a permanent state of emergency, the NUG (National Unity Government) is running the country. Rules, regulations, and rationing control everything–from an intermittent water supply to CCTV. Everyone is supposed to eat a rather suspicious manufactured substance called National Meat Loaf, vegetarianism is ridiculed, and home grown-produce is taxed by Neighbourhood Watch programmes. People who’ve lost their homes in the economic downturn disappear and are relocated to the nether regions of the “outskirts.”

Frances goes back and forth in her descriptions of the past and the present, and as she types her story into the computer (hoping to sell a book if there’s enough paper), she plays with the idea that some of what she’s writing is fiction. She details her major relationships and the lives of her rather disappointing children as she rode the wave of economic affluence to its disappointing conclusion. With numerous marriages, second spouses, lovers and stepchildren, it’s all very complicated. For Weldon fans, reading Chalcot Crescent is very much a pathway through the author’s life and work–the incidents, the loves and the hardships; it’s all here, or at least the parts that Weldon wants us to know about are here, and all treated with her characteristic humour. But apart from the witty and wicked exploration of Frances’s past, there’s also Frances’s present; Amos, Frances’s favourite grandson, a member of the radical breakaway group Redpeace is part of a guerilla composed of members of Frances’s family. While Redpeace plots direct action against the government, Frances is relegated to dotty-old-lady status by her monkey-wrenching grandchildren.

Chalcot Crescent may read like a science-fiction fantasy, and depending just how you feel about the state of the world, reading the novel may be an uncomfortable experience at times. Weldon’s world is not so far removed from reality. Most of us have seen the gutting of the American and British economies, and the subsequent beginnings of a new peasant class. The novel also dabbles with notions of agent provocateurs and Redpeace–a supposedly radical group that’s allowed to exist in plain sight. Again there’s that idea of Weldon’s relevance. Even as I confess to a certain disappointment in the novel’s ending, I suspect that Weldon is much cannier than her critics acknowledge. I was rather hoping for a Shrapnel Academy style ending, but instead as Guy Debord would say, even the most radical gesture will eventually be Recuperated.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions; Reprint edition (September 28, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia Page on Fay Weldon British Council biography of Fay Weldon
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Contemporary women authors: Margaret Atwood Joyce Carol Oates

Bibliography:

• The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967)
• Down Among the Women (1971)
• Female Friends (1975)
• Remember Me (1976)
• Little Sisters (1977)
• Praxis (1978)
• Puffball (1980)
• Watching Me, Watching You: Stories (1981)
• The President’s Child (1982)
• The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983)
• Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen (1984)
• Polaris and Other Stories (1985)
• The Shrapnel Academy (1986)
• The Heart of the Country (1987)
• The Hearts and Lives of Men (1987)
• Leader of the Band (1988)
• The Cloning of Janna May (1989)
• Darcy’s Utopia (1990)
• Growing Rich (1992)
• Life Force (1992)
• Affliction (1994)
• Splitting (1995)
• Worst Fears (1996)
• Big Girls Don’t Cry (1997) (a.k.a. Big Women in UK
• Hard Time to Be a Father : Stories (1998)
• Rhode Island Blues (2000)
• The Bulgari Connection (2001)
• Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide : Stories (2002)
• Mantrapped (2004)
• She May Not Leave (2006)
• The Spa Decameron (2007)
• The Stepmother’s Diary (2008)
• Chalcot Crescent (September 2010)
• Kehua!: A Ghost Story (August 2010 in UK)

Nonfiction:

• Rebecca West (1985)
• Godless in Eden: A Book of Essays (1999)
• Auto da Fay: A Memoir (2002)
• What Makes Women Happy (2006)

“You won’t get away with calling the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland a cunt. Three times.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (JUL 25, 2010)

The Dead Republic from Irish author Roddy Doyle is the third volume in The Last Roundup trilogy. In the first volume, A Star Called Henry, Henry Smart is a youthful soldier for the IRA. He participates in the Easter Uprising of 1916 and fights in the Irish War for Independence. In the second volume, Oh, Play That Thing, the action shifts to America with Henry, his wife and two children trying to eke a living in the depression era. Henry loses a leg and becomes separated from his family. The Dead Republic picks up Henry’s saga for the third and final installment.

The first section of The Dead Republic, the weakest part of the novel, finds Henry in Ireland. It’s 1951, and Henry works as the IRA consultant to director John Ford. Flashbacks reveal Henry’s life in Hollywood and his sometimes difficult relationship with Ford. In one scene, John Ford shows Henry “The Informer,” a film that Henry finds inaccurate but still strangely entertaining:

“None of the corners or accents were real. And some of it was just ridiculous. There was a bit at the start, a flashback, where Gypo and Frankie, old comrades and pals, stood at a bar, singing and drinking, with rifles on their backs. All through the film the lads in the trenchcoats were afraid that the informer would point them out. But they still brought their rifles when they went out for a few pints. It was full of things that made no sense at all.”

Ford also makes “The Quiet Man” starring Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne–a film that at first enrages Henry because he thinks it’s based on his life. The Ireland in the film, however, doesn’t exist anywhere. It’s a Hollywood concoction–a fantasy version designed to win at the box office:

“It’s the story of Ireland. Catholics and Protestants side by side in harmony. Fishing and horse racing. It’s every German’s idea of paradise. And it’s sexy as well.”

Later Henry breaks with Ford and settles back in Ireland where he lands a job as a caretaker of a boys’ school. He strikes up a relationship with a widow called Missis O’Kelly, and yet there’s something about her that reminds Henry of his long-lost wife, Miss O’Shea As time goes on, Henry finds himself dragged back into politics.

The second section of The Dead Republic is the strongest part of the novel, and this is in spite of the fact that Henry serves less as a character and more as a witness of history in the ever-changing face of Ireland. As a survivor of the Easter Rebellion, he’s the subject of great interest, and he finds he’s become a “holy relic.” While Henry agrees with some aspects of the fight, he disagrees with others. As an old warrior, he notes that thanks to the British, the IRA never has problems with recruitment, and that makes Margaret Thatcher the greatest recruitment tool ever:

“The hunger strike had been lost. But it hadn’t. Defeat was always more valuable–the better songs came out of it. Thatcher had done what she’d always been supposed to do. She’d let Irishmen die. They nailed themselves to the cross and she sat in the shade and watched. Cromwell came, slaughtered the innocents, and left. The surviving Irish, in the absence of a grave, pissed on his memory. But Thatcher came, and she stayed. The strikers died in 1981, but she was still Prime Minister years later. She killed Argentineans, she broke the heads of her own coal miners. She was the Provisionals’ greatest asset. She was living, breathing evil and she was on the telly every night.”

The novel raises some interesting moral questions about the choices Henry has made; an old enemy returns from his past, and even though these differences have supposedly resolved themselves over time, the relationship still boils down to a matter of dislike. Both men ask themselves if the sacrifices they made were worth it–after all the fight continues and is muddier than ever–at one point Henry is used by the IRA while at another juncture he’s accused of being an informer. The novel also makes it clear that with a civil war, it’s impossible to avoid involvement. The political situation surrounds Henry and sometimes he’s aware of it–at other times he makes the discovery. While character is repeatedly sacrificed to history, Doyle uses a deft hand when it comes to placing Henry in his role as a witness to the ugly events: the kidnapping of Shergar, the collusion of the loyalist paramilitary group the Ulster Volunteer Force with British agents, the in-fighting between splinter groups, the hunger strikes and the Five Demands of political prisoners. Henry is the amazed and sometimes sickened witness to events that pass before his eyes as though they are produced by a Magic Lantern.

Almost sixty years of Irish history is swept through in just over 300 pages. That’s a huge undertaking and the novel suffers as a result. Those who know little about Irish politics in the last few years will feel their heads reeling. However, if you have a foundation of Irish history, then The Dead Republic won’t be confusing. The story should be approached with the idea in mind that the book is less a novel and more a testament.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (April 29, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Roddy DoyleWikipedia page on Roddy Doyle
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Bullfighting Paula Spencer

Bibliography:

• Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993)
• Wilderness (2007)
• The Deportees: and Other Stories (2008)
• Not Just for Christmas (September 2008)
• Bullfighting: Stories (2011)

Barrytown Trilogy:

• The Commitments (1987)
• The Snapper (1990)
• The Van (1991)

The Last Roundup Trilogy:

• A Star Called Henry (1999)
• Oh. Play That Thing! (2004)
• The Dead Republic (2010)

Paula Spencer Novels:

• The Women Who Walked Into Doors (1996)
• Paula Spencer (2006)

Children’s Books:

• The Giggler Treatment (2000)
• Rover Saves Christmas (2001)
• Meanwhile Adventures (2006)
• Her Mother’s Face (2008)
• A Grey Hound Girl (May 2012)

Nonfiction:

• Rory and Ita (2002)

Movies from books:

• The Commitments (1991)
• The Snapper (1993)
• The Van (1997)