The Reincarnationist by M J Rose

Past lives and present dangers
Reviewed by Maxine Clarke
For The Inquirer
The Reincarnationist
By M. J. Rose
Mira. 458 pp. $24.95
Thirty years ago, a little-known author wrote a best seller that defined a new genre. Robin Cook's Coma was an exciting story about a young female medical student who uncovers a transplant scandal. It later came out that Cook had carefully analyzed the best-seller lists and identified about 20 key common features. He mixed these into one book, and the rest was history.
Of course, it wasn't as simple as all that: A doctor himself, Cook is an excellent writer, and was strongly motivated by his desire to highlight in a popular fashion the problem - then little-appreciated - of organ supply at a time when transplant technology was just becoming routine.
The Reincarnationist, the new book by M. J. Rose, reminds me strongly of that story, in that this racy read taps into several current top-selling themes.
Rose's novel opens as Josh Ryder, a photojournalist, is injured during a terrorist attack. While Josh is unconscious, he "is" Julius, a pagan Roman living in A.D. 391, guarding the vestal virgins from the emperor's soldiers, who are cruelly enforcing the Christian religion. After Josh comes round, these flashes of a past life occur frequently, if unchronologically. Hence, we learn that Julius was having an illicit affair with Sabina, head of the vestals, and was desperately trying to reach her at a tomb when attacked by the soldiers. Sabina was in charge of some secret memory stones, said to hold the secrets of all human experience if one had the mnemonic tools to understand the strange markings on them.
Yes, indeed, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is clearly in evidence, reinforced by a long sequence near the start of the book when present-day Josh visits a tomb in Rome that may be that of Sabina, witnesses a violent robbery, and hooks up with attractive archaeology professor Gabriella Chase. The two are soon on the run in Rome (sound familiar?), trying to evade the shadowy pursuers who steal Gabriella's research papers, as well as the police, who suspect Josh of having a role in the fatal events at the tomb.
Back in New York, the home of Josh and Gabriella, Josh visits the Talmage Institute, where reincarnation is studied as a science, as he is driven to seek Sabina in her present-day guise. As well as his regular flashbacks to Julius' life, Josh also experiences a previous existence as Percy Talmage, a rich young New York socialite in the late 19th century, poisoned by his uncle. Can it be a coincidence that Percy is of the same family whose descendants run the institute and, it soon transpires, have an interest in the very same memory stones and tools that Sabina guarded?
In addition to Josh and Gabriella's attempts to discover who is behind the robbery and why Gabriella is being stalked, we meet Rachel and her uncle, Alex, an art collector. Rachel, too, is troubled by her strange sense of having lived a previous life, precipitated by her meeting with, and magnetic attraction to, a sinister fellow called Harrison. She also seeks help at the Talmage Institute, but is turned away because only children are studied there. I couldn't help smiling at the reason: If the director agreed to investigate adult claims of reincarnation, she would lose her "scientific" credibility. Before Rachel leaves the institute, she and Josh meet. Josh immediately feels a connection with her. Could they have known each other in previous lives? In desperation, she seeks his help to calm her own fears, precipitated by her "memories" of Harrison's past evil deeds.
The Reincarnationist is a clever attempt to mix and match current popular book trends, wrapping the whole into a supernatural package. Its twisting plot demands that the present mystery can only be solved by an understanding of the past lives of the characters. In trying to achieve this goal, the book is far too episodic: The flashbacks to ancient Rome are vivid enough, but the present-day characters and their dramatic dilemmas seem flat. As for the 19th-century subplot, it is merely distracting - until the final pages, when its relevance is revealed.
The book is far too long: A taut, suspenseful 300-page novel could have been crafted from the existing 458 pages. It is also badly written: Sentences are clumsily constructed; strings of paragraphs often consist of three or four words each. The characters are cliches of romantic fiction, constantly overwhelmed by exaggerated emotions.
As a mystery, the book simply doesn't work, partly because the identity of the criminal mastermind is obvious from the start, but also because the many themes detract from the one-dimensional "twist" in the dénouement.
The markings on the stones, stressed as vital throughout the book, are studied in a race against time by a late-appearing Indiana Jones-type character, but there is no tension in the cracking of the code, and we are not told how it is done or what it reveals. As a thriller, the book works better - so long as you are happy to suspend disbelief concerning the supernatural as well as to accept many coincidences.
Like Robin Cook, M. J. Rose has a superb instinct for marketing. She is, rightly, a widely admired figure among authors for all the marketing and publishing advice she freely provides. The Reincarnationist is written by someone with a great grasp of what sells. For me, however, it was neither absorbing nor exciting.
Maxine Clarke is an editor at the science journal Nature. Her blog, "Petrona," is at http://petrona.typepad.com/.

Published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, 20 November 2007.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

A beach honeymoon amid shifting sands
On Chesil Beach
By Ian McEwan
Nan A. Talese / Doubleday.
203 pp. $22
Reviewed by Maxine Clarke
For The Inquirer (3 June 2007)
In On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan returns to the novella, a form in which he is a master. His first published works were short stories, often sinister vignettes whose unsettling power lay in their sense of oppressive atmosphere. Since those early days, of course, McEwan has written 10 full-length novels, most notably The Child in Time and Atonement, powerful, rich narratives featuring eventual healing and redemption after seemingly unbearable loss and despair.
McEwan's last novel, Saturday, was not typical of his work. It was a consciously uplifting response to the events of Sept. 11, 2001 - almost a technical exercise, limited to describing the events of a single day. One of its most memorable aspects was the description of the purchase, preparation and cooking of a fish stew, recipe available at the author's official Web site.
On Chesil Beach is a world apart from such literary devices, being on the surface a straightforward, even mundane narrative in which little happens. Yet the whole is infused with a bitter poignancy. It is completely absorbing. Even if not exactly designed to be read in one sitting, that is how it ought to be read, since doing so enables one to better join its brief interlude of intensity.
The framework is the youth and courtship, culminating in the wedding, of Edward and Florence in 1962 England. Rationing was a recent memory, youth was nascently emerging as a culture, World War II was the main influence on moral attitudes at all levels of society. I was born in England 10 years after Edward and Florence, and remember how the war dominated my childhood: in comics, books, movies, newspapers and conversations all around. Life was austere for most people: Eating out was a rare treat; books were mainly borrowed from the library; clothes were not fashion items but were bought to last; people did not buy expensive items until they could "save up" the money. A national mood of serious endeavor was firmly entrenched. McEwan has set his story when the country was at a point of balance: Harold Macmillan, the prime minister of the day, famously used the words "you've never had it so good" to describe this boring, drab England (how we smile at the phrase from our modern, jaded perspective). For the swinging '60s were about to burst on the scene: Change of government, hippiedom, personal gratification, French cuisine, the new wave, the Pill, and the materialism enabled by Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology" were all just around the corner.
The time of this balance point in society is also the balance point in the relationship between Edward and Florence - on their honeymoon night, to be precise, in a Dorset hotel on Chesil Beach. Their small-scale story is told amid reflections on politics, sexual attitudes and social mores, perfectly capturing the peculiarly British repression and embarrassment of the time. One gets to know the characters as children, their parents, their social class, and where they lived all influencing their dreams and personalities.
The innocence of the postwar country, at the tipping point of change, is mirrored in the innocence of both main characters and their separate anticipation of their wedding-night deflowering. Florence is a musician, who can lose herself only when playing her violin. Edward's particular sensitivity lies in his response to the beauty of nature: wild flowers, birds and the natural world - feelings he represses under a veneer of "manliness."
Before their wedding, Edward and Florence have each arrived at a personal way to feel their emotions in the coded era in which they live. They each have their own personal ambitions, born perhaps out of frustration, but nevertheless, dreams. Edward wants to write about characters from history who briefly appeared, had a strong impact on one event, but then faded out. This strange interest is the key to his character. Florence has always been politely rejected by her mother, an Oxford academic of "progressive" tendencies, and has an ambiguous relationship with her businessman father. She's a timid, neat and well-behaved girl, but when she plays her violin or directs her string quartet, Edward observes her metamorphosis into a vibrant and confident being. Can each of these rather sad young people transduce their individual adaptive, private certainties into emotional intelligence: open honesty about their own feelings with each other? In what direction will the scales tip, balanced as they are that night on the unstable, shifting pebbles of the beach?
This short book is intense and powerful, particularly so at the end, when, in the fullness of time, one character can finally understand the cost and effect of the night on Chesil Beach, and see what could have happened if different words had been said or different actions taken. It is here, in the reflections of the older person looking back to the youth within, that we experience the insight of the story. It is no exaggeration to say that the book is a masterpiece - in miniature, maybe, but a masterpiece nonetheless.
Maxine Clarke is an editor at the science journal Nature. Read her blog Petrona.

Lying with Strangers by James Grippando

Soap opera shocks plus thriller chills
James Grippando takes a break from Jack Swyteck for a plot-stuffed pastiche that still packs a punch
Lying with Strangers
By James Grippando
HarperCollins. 391 pp. $24.95
Reviewed by Maxine Clarke
James Grippando's new novel doesn't feature his series character, Miami-based lawyer Jack Swyteck, but instead introduces a woman doctor who is beautiful, driven, ambitious and stalked by the creepy "Rudy," who has her under surveillance.
After setting this scene, Lying with Strangers immediately switches track, describing our heroine's residency at a clinic, her cool-headed treatment of a dangerously injured baby, and subsequent efficient dispatching of the assailant. Far from being applauded for this feat, however, she and her hospital are threatened with a double lawsuit.
The book races on at breakneck pace, running through so many themes that my head whirled. Eventually, in a little detective work of my own, I realized that the key to the book is in the main character's name: Peyton. Yes, I was reading a pastiche soap opera, and the heroine's name is a homage to the mother of all soaps, Grace Metalious' 1957 classic Peyton Place.
Maybe my theory isn't right, but even so, Lying with Strangers is a whistle-stop tour round many current fashions in the thriller genre. We have Peyton's creepily obsessed stalker (Thomas Harris); her high-tech, high-pressure job at the hospital (Robin Cook); her troubled marriage, with her husband jealous of her success, always away and probably unfaithful (Mary Higgins Clark); the lawsuit (John Grisham). Added to the mix are Peyton's unhappy childhood with a kind but weak father and a cold, controlling mother, who, when Peyton was a young child, mysteriously had a baby who died in the hospital before coming home. Peyton is always reminded that she is a disappointment compared with what this second child could have become.
It is practically impossible to convey all the pertinent events of the novel in a brief review. A surprise birthday party for Peyton causes her to be terrified, culminating in her being run off the road. Later, her presumed assailant is found dead in circumstances that bring suspicion on Peyton. In a moment of weakness during one of her husband's mysterious absences, she goes out for a consoling drink with an ex-boyfriend, now a nurse at the hospital, and spends the night at his place. Circumstances conspire to make it look as if this was not as innocent as Peyton claims. Then the nurse vanishes, and a mysterious person phones Peyton and Kevin (her husband), demanding a ransom. They refuse to pay. The consequences mean that Peyton ends up in court, charged with a crime she did not commit, but painted by the prosecution as a deeply unsympathetic character. The reason (more accurately, one of the reasons) for Kevin's absences is revealed, which becomes yet another plot strand that could come from another book.
I had to keep reading Lying with Strangers once I'd started it, because no sooner is one problem thrown at poor persecuted Peyton, who resiliently and capably deals with it, than another looms up to take its place. The constant cliffhangers, combined with an easy writing style, make the book slip by in no time. But the provision of so many excitements means that no one storyline is very developed, and many ideas peter out.
Although I fell for some red herrings, I did guess the identity of the person behind the malevolence: Still, the ending has real punch. But as with so many crime novels, one feels that the villain could easily have found a far simpler way to achieve certain goals than to construct such a convoluted edifice of deception.
The soap-opera format left me feeling as if I'd eaten a meal of every flavor of ice cream rather than one with a better balance of nutrients. Nothing wrong with ice cream, of course - it is fun, escapist and, unless one eats too much of it too often, harmless. In this case, the heroine is feisty, intelligent, capable and attractive, and if she returns in another volume I might well read it. Nevertheless, I do hope that the flavor next time will be one or two scoops with a sprinkle of chocolate chips, rather than quite so comprehensively tutti frutti.

Maxine Clarke is an editor at the science journal Nature, and blogs at Petrona

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday 27 May 2007.

The Grave Tattoo

From The Philadelphia Inquirer
Posted on Wed, Feb. 07, 2007
Uniting the poet and the mutineer
The Grave Tattoo
By Val McDermid
St Martin's Minotaur.
390 pp. $24.95
Reviewed by Maxine Clarke
A little-known fact about Fletcher Christian, leader of the mutiny on the Bounty, was that he was born on a farm in Cumbria, in the English Lake District, in 1764, six years before William Wordsworth, whom he probably knew.
Val McDermid's latest novel is an inventive historical mystery taking off from these bare facts. The trigger is the discovery of a body in a Lakeland fell, a body well over 100 years old and covered with tattoos in what turn out to be all the right places. Capt. William Bligh had described Christian thus: "5 ft. 9 in. High. Dark Swarthy Complexion. Hair - Blackish or very dark brown. Make - Strong. A Star tatowed [sic] on his left Breast, and tatowed on the backside."
The book's main character, Jane Gresham, is a Wordsworth scholar struggling to make ends meet in a part-time, underfunded position at London University. She works in a bar to pay the rent for a rundown council flat in a notorious area of the capital, and has befriended a 13-year-old neighbor, Tenille, who shares Jane's passion for Wordsworth. Tenille hides out in Jane's flat when she needs to escape from the domestic dangers of life with her guardian, a feckless aunt.
For some years, Jane has been working on a theory that Wordsworth and Christian were at school together, and that after the mutiny Christian left Pitcairn Island and returned to England to clear his name. Bligh, of course, had managed to survive being cast adrift in an open boat and had already returned home himself. So Christian could never have cleared his name, and Jane believes he was sheltered by Wordsworth. What is more, she thinks Wordsworth wrote a poem to vindicate Fletcher - a poem he meant to be published after both he and his subject had died, but that was hidden by Wordsworth's children and subsequent descendants.
Jane's theory has run into the ground for lack of evidence, but when she learns about the discovery of the body she dashes up to the Lake District to see if the cadaver could in fact be Christian. Tenille, however, finds herself on the run from the police and frantically makes for the only person she can trust: Jane. Added to the mix are Jake, Jane's ex-boyfriend who has deserted academia for the private sector and who is after the lost poem for its huge financial value; River, a female pathologist who wants to maximize the media value of her work on the body; a divorced cop; and Dan, a strangely eager, helpful academic colleague of Jane's. All these threads converge in a "pick-and-mix" literary confection based around the village of Grasmere and the local inhabitants.
Val McDermid has written about a score of excellent crime-fiction books. Originally published by a women's publisher (the Women's Press) and long admired by readers of detective stories, she has fairly recently broken into the big time with the TV serialization of her books on criminal psychologist Tony Hill. McDermid also wrote two other series, one about freelance journalist Lindsay Gordon, and another about a Manchester-based P.I., Kate Brannigan, as well as excellent if harrowing stand-alone novels.
The Grave Tattoo is well up to the standard of these previous offerings, but is much lighter in tone: It owes far more to the cozy tradition of Agatha Christie than the hard-boiled legacy of Raymond Chandler.
McDermid's last few books have been pretty graphic. The Grave Tattoo, however, contains nothing that would make your granny flinch. It is the most mainstream of McDermid's works that I've read.
The Grave Tattoo is strongest in its descriptions of the Lake District. The life of a fell farmer, the problems of living and working in a major tourist attraction, the weather and countryside are all convincingly and naturally portrayed. Where the book is less successful is in the characters, who are all somewhat wooden.
Jane is an attractive enough heroine, and her family seems realistic, but the other characters, Tenille and her gang-lord father in particular, are weak and one-dimensional. The details of the plot, too, don't stand up to careful scrutiny: How likely is it that nobody at Jane's work would know her cell phone number, or that the local police would never think to look up her parents in the phone book?
Still, it's a fast and easily digestible read. My advice is lock the doors, switch off the phone, put the kettle on, and settle in for two or three hours. It won't take any longer than that to read the book, and the process will be pleasant enough.
What of the Christian theory? You'll have to read the book to find out McDermid's own explanation. In reality, the considered view is that the link between Wordsworth and Christian, first suggested in a 1950s book, The Wake of the Bounty by C.S. Wilkinson - used as a source by McDermid - is fanciful. (Wilkinson even suggested that Christian was the model for Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.) Wordsworth and Christian were not at school together, although Wordsworth did attend the same school for six months - after Christian had left. The families did know each other, but there is no evidence for ties as close as those espoused by Wilkinson or McDermid's Jane Gresham. Wordsworth scholar Mary Moorman, in her review of Wilkinson's book, demolished most of the thesis.
Facts, of course, are not romantic, and McDermid's artistic license makes for an engaging and clever plot. The Grave Tattoo is none the worse for that.
Maxine Clarke is an editor at the science journal Nature. Read her blog Petrona at http://petrona.typepad.com.

What came before he shot her

New Elizabeth George an odd prequel
Her 14th Scotland Yard novel treats events leading to the 13th. An intriguing premise fails to develop.
What Came Before He Shot Her
By Elizabeth George
HarperCollins. 560 pp. $26.95
Reviewed by Maxine Clarke
Every crime-fiction book succeeds or fails on its denouement - the moment of discovery when the villain is revealed and the mystery solved. And the most important rule for a crime-fiction reviewer is: Don't give away the ending.
Elizabeth George is the author of a baker's dozen novels featuring Scotland Yard detective Thomas Lindley and four associates. The books are interesting character studies as well as cleverly plotted, and deserve their commercial success. One reason I like them, presumably unintended by the American author, is that they portray a Neverland Britain - a country where Lord Peter Wimsey still exists and where forensic science is the province of independently wealthy amateurs.
In With No One as Witness, the unlucky 13th (and previous) book in the series, one of the core characters is shot. Reviewers did their duty and did not reveal the victim's name. In George's new book, What Came Before He Shot Her, the intriguing premise is to describe the events leading up to the shooting from the perspective of the perpetrators. So how review this book without "spoiling" the previous one? And how convey how the new book culminates in such an infuriating disappointment without giving away the crux of it, too?
In her previous books in the series, George has not provided a linear narrative between novels. She's varied the settings and the issues, relating each novel from the viewpoint of different characters among the core five. And the books have real emotional depth. Missing Joseph, for example, is as moving and insightful an account of infertility as I have read anywhere. Yet the next book in the series barely features this character at all, instead covering other players and a story about the intricacies of test-match cricket. For the Sake of Elena contains an intense subplot about Helen's sister's post-natal depression - but this is barely even mentioned in passing in future books. It is as if George worries a subject to death, gets bored with it, and moves on.
What Came Before is a letdown. I wanted to like it, but could not identify with any of the characters, who are either stupid, or only able to see as far as satisfying their next impulse, or opportunistic. The three abandoned children pivotal to the events are so hopelessly abused and stunted by their ghastly early life that they are but passive observers of their own misery from page one (literally). There is poignancy in their hopeless situation, but the long series of disconnected vignettes that constitutes the book creates an unconvincing whole.
The book is a narrow and claustrophobic portrait of the people who live at the "bottom," who have no knowledge of or care about the wider world they live in because it has been beaten or squeezed out of them: No interest in education, no opportunity to learn or read, unrealistic expectations, and desperate poverty. Yet as an attempt at psychological insight about the inevitability of the fate of these damaged children, abandoned by selfish parents and unreachable by anyone in the caring professions, the book fails.
In previous books, one could smile at the unintentionally anachronistic moments in the lives of Thomas, Helen and Simon (Deborah, and particularly Barbara, are far more realistic). But the new book portrays a relentlessly miserable collection of humanity. The bloopers are thus harder to indulge. Major plot developments flop because, for example, nobody has heard of free bus passes or welfare benefits. This is simply not believable. And the book is riddled with such implausibilities.
George certainly has an ear for dialogue and the inner voice of her characters, but the characters in this book do not exist in a cohesive environment, but rather in a series of disconnected scenes that ignore whole chunks of their lives. Some of these scenes work better than others: Vanessa shoplifting in the Queensway shopping mall is spot-on. But others don't: 12-year-old Joel as a mature, instant poet of full-blown genius is ridiculous.
There is, at long last, a denouement of sorts, involving a cold manipulator acting out of pique over a personal rejection. But we do not discover any answers to questions stimulated by the previous book. Why was that particular victim targeted for the titular shooting? What underlies the ruthless coldness of the villain? We aren't told the answer to these and many other questions. And without familiar characters for sustenance, readers are, like the characters in the book, left out in the cold.

Maxine Clarke is a science editor for the journal Nature. Her Web log Petrona is at http://petrona.typepad.com.

Philadelphia Inquirer Sun 15 October 2006

Through a glass, darkly

Mystery features life in Venice, death in a glass factory

Jun 04, 2006

Reviewed by Maxine Clarke

Through a Glass, Darkly

By Donna Leon

Atlantic Monthly Press. 256 pp. $23

Donna Leon's 15th book to feature Commissario Guido Brunetti is, as we have come to expect, a superb evocation of life in Venice - with crime somewhere in the background.

Leon's books are short. This one is barely more than 250 pages, and the murder does not happen until halfway through. Though the mystery of who and why is known by the end, the details of the process of apprehending the criminal are not addressed. Nor, when the body is found, is there any need for gruesome depiction of the event - although the death was a gory one. Yet the story is no less involving: an object lesson in minimalism.

The evocation of Brunetti's life as a senior policeman, husband and father in this, the most beautiful city in the world, is so confident and assured that one is drawn in from the opening two paragraphs - a description of springtime - and does not emerge until the last few pages, a lovely vignette about a Venetian boatman.

In between, the theme is the contrast between new and old. Environmentalists are agitating about the effects on fragile Venice of pollution from the industrial plants of Marghera. But what of the older threat from the traditional glassmaking factories of Murano? Is there any truth to the apparently delusional obsession of night watchman Signor Tossini, who is convinced that his young daughter's illness results from activities there? The plot is a showcase for descriptions of the process of glassblowing and the beauty of the finished product.

No Leon book would be complete without the background of political corruption and bureaucracy for which Italy is famed - though they are mere hints in this particular outing, rather than major plot elements. Official police investigations, so riddled with the politics of necessity, get nowhere. Brunetti's approach - essentially simple interest in his fellow man - provides solutions.

Brunetti is one of the most attractive policemen in crime fiction today. He is of no fashion or era - this book, for example, features his interest in Dante's Inferno (including some lovely passages of translation and observation) and in nautical charts. He has no need of the Internet or Interpol, though GPS crops up and the cell phone is no less ubiquitous in Leon's Venice than everywhere else in the world. (I learn, to my delight, that a cell phone is called "baby telephone" - telefonini - in Italian; picking up occasional colloquialisms is one of the many pleasures of reading a Donna Leon book. )

As usual, the tension between Brunetti and his boss, Vice-Questore Patta, provides amusement: Brunetti has to anticipate Patta's attempts to block any police work that does not directly fit into his own plans for self-advancement. Patta's assistant - and my favorite character - the mysterious Signora Elettra, has a relatively minor role in the new book, though she is her usual efficient self and still seems to be the only person in the police department who has a computer or knows how to use it. (Brunetti continues, in 2006, leaving a note on a colleague's desk to ask to see him the next day, rather than sending an e-mail. ) There is, however, an unusual tension this time between Elettra and Brunetti, which I hope will be developed in a future book.

Brunetti's family is not center stage in this novel, either, though wife Paola (in my opinion the least successful character) is - again as usual - holding down a job as a senior academic, has complete empathy with her children, cooks fantastic meals from scratch, does not offer a word of reproach when her husband forgets to come home to eat them, and still has time to attend gallery openings. I suppose paragons like Paola exist, but I haven't met any. I did smile in recognition, however, when Paola calls Brunetti at work, and he, being in the middle of a train of thought, momentarily forgets who she is.

I struggle to think of other series authors who are as dependable as the excellent Leon: Hazel Holt springs to mind. Holt's books, also short and pared-down, combine a common-sense investigator with restrained yet pointed social comment, and each one is reliably up to the standard of the last. Leon's have an additional dimension beyond the immediate solution to the crime. I finish a Leon book feeling not only that I have read a satisfying detective story, but that I know what life in Venice is like for the ordinary people who live and work there.

Maxine Clarke is an editor for the science journal Nature. She can be reached at http://petrona-maxine.blogspot.com. [Correction: http://petrona.typepad.com]

Published in the Philadelphia Inquirer 4 June 2006.

The Mercy Seat

Carrying not coals to Newcastle, but hard-boiled, U.S.-style crime
Apr 12, 2006

The Mercy Seat
By Martyn Waites
Pegasus. 421 pp. $25
Reviewed by Maxine Clarke

Ask anyone who has heard of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne to name the connection with the city that springs to mind, and in all likelihood the reply will feature the soccer team Newcastle United; or the "lovable rogue" Geordies epitomized by the TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet; or Get Carter starring Michael Caine - possibly Britain's most famous and hardest-boiled gangster movie until The Long Good Friday (itself usurped by Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels).

It is this territory that is claimed by Martyn Waites in his new novel, The Mercy Seat. Originally from Newcastle, Waites has lived mostly in London as an actor (playing villains, usually), and turned to writing novels some years ago. He is an admirer of such U.S. crime-fiction writers as James Ellroy, James Lee Burke, Andrew Vacchs, and Sara Paretsky, and aims to bring their approach to a particular place in Britain. He has chosen Newcastle as a counterpart to the Chicago of Paretsky, the New York of Vacchs, the L.A. of Michael Connelly.

The Mercy Seat has multiple plot strands: The main character is an ex-journalist called Joe Donovan whose young son disappeared some time in the past, and who as a consequence has left his job and gone to live in depressed seclusion and squalor in a small, isolated cottage in the north of the country.

Another strand concerns a young "rent boy," Jamal, who has stolen a tape that everyone, including a man with a sapphire embedded in his front tooth, is desperate to get back. Then there are the mysteries of the missing scientist; of what two strange surveillance agents are up to; of why the newspaper's lawyer is so keen for Joe to come out of his self-imposed retirement to help find a missing colleague. Atmosphere is provided both by Waites' knowledge of the geographical area, and by his strong writing about the unhappy lives and histories of abandoned and abused children living on the streets.

The last (and only) book of Waites' that I read was his first novel, Mary's Prayer. In many ways the earlier book is a rehearsal for The Mercy Seat, featuring similar plot, characters and themes. But while Mary's Prayer was stilted, cliched and unbelievable, The Mercy Seat convinces. Until about halfway through, it is readable enough but nothing special. But at the beginning of part 3, it gets you. It's a fantastic and rare moment: You can feel the author's grip tightening, the emotions driving various characters weaving the plot into cohesion. Thankfully, the final revelation of the core "mystery," so often the stumbling block for this type of fiction, seems realistic (in context) and believable.

Is Newcastle really the dangerous place depicted by Waites, replete with drug dealers, child abusers, corrupt police and thugs not shy about beating anyone up at the drop of a hat - or using the eponymous mercy seat (from the song by Johnny Cash about the death-row prisoner)? Well, I don't know. You wouldn't know it to go there, but then if you went to Nottingham you wouldn't see what John Harvey's Resnik sees; Rebus' Edinburgh is a perception of Ian Rankin; and London's seamier side is the territory of so many writers that one is surprised not to be constantly tripping over last night's bodies on the way to work in the morning.But the important feature of Waites' environment is that the reader can suspend disbelief and be carried along by the plot (which has a few holes, but I'm not complaining). And, as in the very best crime fiction, one can "learn" something on the journey. Events may be exaggerated, but in the process Waites highlights injustices from his personal knowledge of offenders in prison, victims of child abuse, and socially excluded teenagers.I'm glad that Joe Donovan will return in a sequel, The Bone Machine, next year.

Maxine Clarke is a crime-fiction enthusiast who lives in Surrey, England. She is an editor at the scientific journal Nature. Visit her blog, Petrona, at http://petrona-maxine.blogspot.com/.

This review was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The man who smiled

Nabbing the villain is the weakest part of a strong book

The Man Who Smiled
By Henning Mankell
Translated by Laurie Thompson
The New Press. 325 pp. $24.95
Reviewed by Maxine Clarke

Inspector Kurt Wallander of the police force in Ystad, Sweden, has killed a man, and has spent more than a year on sick leave, unable to continue with his work. At the start of The Man Who Smiled, he finally decides to quit. But that very day, he discovers that an acquaintance, Sten Torstensson, who has recently asked him for help, has been murdered, which leads him to change his mind.
Henning Mankell's Wallander books are mainly about character - the characters of the police force, that is, not of the criminal mind. The reader knows from almost the first page that an apparent suicide, Torstensson's father, was in fact murdered. Not only this, but how and by whom. Yet it is not until one-third of the way through the book that the police are sure that the first death was in fact a murder. And only after another 100 pages, two-thirds of the way through, do they realize who is responsible. The strength of the book is to draw the reader into the police investigation, trying like them to tie the clues and threads together into a coherent picture. Nothing much happens until the last 50 pages.
Why is this book so compelling? In a word, the character of Wallander. This is a man who approaches his work like an academic: "So much police work is dull routine, but there could occasionally be moments of inspiration and excitement, an almost childish delight in playing around with feasible alternatives."
Wallander is not the policeman of crime-fiction cliche who tries to solve the mystery on his own without collaborating with colleagues, nor is he the type who can be persuaded to do anything for expediency. He just follows his own stubborn course. So the heart of the book is the inner life and thoughts of this unromantic, fiftyish man, and how he doggedly convinces first himself and then his colleagues and superiors that there is a thread to follow, a thread that will lead to an answer. The satisfaction of the book comes from a description of this exercise of the mind, not from any thriller or graphic elements.
Wallander spends much of the book following slight leads, not letting any of them, however tenuous, go. A typical example is when a person tangential to the investigation is found to have committed suicide some time ago, in a different part of the country. Wallander visits the victim's boss, who barely knew him, but provides the information that the previous boss had retired after many years' service. So Wallander visits the retired man. He knocks on his door out of the blue and asks to talk to him. The witness replies: "I'm an old man, tired but not yet quite finished. I admit to being curious. I'll answer your questions, if I can."
This leads to the first major break in the case, and pretty well sums up the pared-down, unsentimental style of these books. Later in the story, Wallander is interviewing a young woman journalist: "They both worked on investigations, they both spent their time constantly running up against crime and human suffering. The difference was that she was trying to expose crime to prevent it happening, while Wallander was always occupied in clearing up crimes that had already been committed."
Mankell is not writing "mere" genre fiction, but about the sadness of the human condition.
Eventually, Wallander gets his man. To me, this was the least satisfactory part of the story. After setting up the situation in which Sweden is changing after the assassination of Olof Palme, becoming a younger country with a different type of criminal and hence a different type of policeman (or -woman), the book peters out. Wallander finds himself in a standard "hero in peril" situation, and although the villain is apprehended, I found this unconvincing - indeed almost self-induced. The plot also depends on the villain's being ruthlessly efficient at dispatching people without leaving clues, but then suddenly becoming strangely inefficient at this task.
But do not be put off from reading this book, which is excellent. For an unknown (to me) reason, Mankell's books have been translated into English in non-chronological order. The Man Who Smiled is the fourth Wallander story of eight. I have read the others, and would probably not have read this one had I not been asked to review it, as I know what happens in subsequent books. That would have been a mistake, not least because this is the book in which policewoman Ann-Britt Hoglund makes her debut. I commend the New Press (www.thenewpress.com) for publishing this as well as other Mankell novels and nonfiction works in translation.

Maxine Clarke is a science editor for the journal Nature. Her Web log Petrona is at http://petrona.typepad.com.

Review at Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday 17 September 2006