Month: August 2021

The fifth instalment in the ongoing adventures of Isaiah Quintabe, geeky private detective extraordinaire in the hells of Los Angeles, “Smoke” no longer follows the standard format of “client presents case, IQ solves it.” At the end of the explosive fourth book, IQ fled LA and Grace, the love of his life, shattered by violence. Smoke chronicles his recovery steps, hidden a long way away, while back in his home town, we follow the adventures of Grace, sometime friend Deronda, and his on-again-off-again hipster partner Dodson, while the author introduces three disparate villains of varying levels of depravity. Like James Lee Burke, Joe Ide seems to specialise in picaresque, nigh emblematic bad guys, and Smoke sizzles with their horrors and plans. The plot rockets along, and the characters are, as always, alive with zest and ripe dialogue and thoughts. I missed the old IQ, solver of puzzles, until some of the subplots meshed together and he is forced to use all his skills. A white-knuckle ride, that’s what Smoke is, and wonderfully written. I would recommend beginning at the first book, though.

A Malcolm Gladwell book or podcast (and they are similar) is a breath of fresh intellectual air. Even if you disagree with his latest thinking, his argument always chimes sweetly and the telling is sure-footed. “The Bomber Mafia: A Story Set in War” is another readily readable slice of history, this time the quest of a ragtag group of American air force officers, from just before WWII, to invent pinpoint bombing and, potentially, to make ground and sea warfare moot. Gladwell tackles this idea slowly and thoughtfully, telling the tale of a reclusive, crusty Dutch inventor who invents the bomb sight, then traversing the war until the post-war lunacies of Curtis LeMay. Carry The Bomber Mafia to a park in springtime, read it in one sitting, and momentarily consider Gladwell’s intriguing musings soon forgotten.

Missing out on Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason’s varied works to date is regrettable, for on the evidence of “On Time and Water,” he is a sumptuous, precise stylist. Part memoir, part historical exploration, part climate emergency plea, part climate science exposition, On Time and Water ranges effortlessly over Magnason’s investigations into Finland’s ancient glaciers, indeed the world’s glaciers, as they begin to melt at an accelerating rate; over the notion of past time as experienced by his grandparents; over mythologies, generating his conceit that a holy cow has reached out to him to write the book; and over the notion of future time in the Anthropocene Age. Two interviews with the Dalai Lama offers reflections on mortality and the glacial melting in the Himalayas. Switching effortlessly between journalese and poetic prose, Magnason champions a far richer relationship with the future, out to his great-great-grandchildren, in place of the prevalent short-termism that threatens us all. A most rousing read, On Time and Water should be required reading for young people (we in the older generation seem to be a lost cause).

“Fire, Storm and Flood: The Violence of Climate Change” is labelled “a photographic record” of the climate emergency, and is structured as stunning stock photos, each accompanied by a couple of pages of fluent narrative prose. The author, a British Earth systems scientist, has artfully selected vignettes and climate tales from around the world and through time. As a collection of short essays on aspects of climate change occurring now or forecast to occur with certainty, it is timely. Essays that impacted me included the one of back to back photos of a glacier now and decades ago; the heavily populated Thar Desert across Pakistan and India; the ignominy of the Athabasca Oil Sands; the 2018 China heatwave; and Death Valley temperatures approaching wet bulb death levels. Although useful and often compelling, I pined for a cogent narrative through-line to shape for my reading, and I was irritated by the book’s progressive timeline which is small and unreadable on a tablet. Fire, Storm and Flood is worth considering if you are hungry for global warming stories.

Iain Ryan’s previous noir outing, The Student, featured a gormless, unlikeable character in an academic setting, thrust down a violent rabbit hole “The Spiral” has that much in common with its predecessor, only this time our protagonist Erma is a lecturer adept at martial arts and researching choose-your-own-adventure novels. After a colleague shoots her twice, nearly killing her, and then dies, Erma is left with unanswered questions that spur a twisting, semi-surreal plot that unfolds, slowly at first, before plunging into a classic noir hellishness. Erma is viscerally rendered; I disliked her from the get-go but was gripped by a desire to see her triumph against terrible odds. The author is a savagely realistic stylist, notable for pungent dialogue. The book’s blurb mentions Mullholland Drive; a seemingly bizarre feature is a parallel narrative inside a computer game, but even this feature resolves itself intelligently. Overall, The Spiral is a coruscating, white-knuckle adventure in adept hands, like a plunge into an Arctic ice hole.

The tone of “The Dictionary of Lost Words,” an ode to words and dictionaries and the impact of both on our inner and outer lives, is earnest, sweet, and surprisingly unadorned. In short, this debut novel by Australian Pip Williams should have set my teeth grinding. Indeed it took a third of the book for the underlying intelligence and subtlety of the unfolding yarn to grip me in its maw. The story of Esme, daughter of one of the lexicographers assembling and adjudicating the first Oxford English Dictionary at the turn of the Twentieth Century, amasses gravity as she grows from childhood into marriage, amidst World War I and, crucially, the suffragette movement. At a young age, she begins to collect unwanted words, which so often arose from women’s language and experiences, and eventually she moves to collect women’s word herself. Thus the closing half of The Dictionary of Lost Words escalates into an absorbing, affecting morality tale that resonates in our current times. Plus, of course, any book that celebrates words and their subtleties should be celebrated. Gentle and deep.