Author: Andres Kabel

My first Emmanuel Carrère book, V13: Chronicle of a Trial, has made me an instant convert. The esteemed author asked to be commissioned to write weekly about the sensational, grueling nine-month-long 2021-2022 trial in Paris of fourteen defendants of the horrific multi-location terrorist attack in 2015 that killed 130 and maimed hundreds. He missed very few days of the court sessions and grew to know many of the plaintiffs, lawyers, and even defendants. At the start of the book, the author’s plain, smooth, open-hearted style suggests the book will miss something vital about the case’s dramas or themes but great skill is at play. The reader becomes drawn in, until the feeling is of sitting on the author’s shoulder. Whilst never downplaying the dumb savagery of the attackers’ motives and tactics, he manages to draw each of the fourteen as an individual. Tragedies upon tragedies, either for survivors or families of the dead, are sketched with wonderful empathy. As we approach the climax of the judge’s verdicts and sentences, washes of emotion flood the court, including Carrère, who writes that what he anticipated as a “vain, colossal judicial spectacle,” instead morphed into something much more: “No: this was something else: a unique experience of horror, pity, proximity and presence.” V13: Chronicle of a Trial is a gently riveting and brave nonfiction chronicle that reminded me of Helen Garner at her best; I can offer no greater recommendation.

In his extraordinary ode to neurodivergence, Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum, Daniel Tammet, neurodivergent himself, plies language in the service of nine very different minds. Eschewing direct quotation, he gently (often oh so gently) retells their experiences (relying on copious interviews of and around his subjects) now and in the past, happy and sad, showing us innermost fears and joys while sketching the public personas involved. Some of the “minds” are super functioning in the way we imagine for autistic savants: a hand and wrist surgeon of international repute who nonetheless cannot remember faces; freakish comedian Dan Ackroyd, so different in humor and in life from an early age; a “murder detective” with an uncanny ability to solve crimes others give up on; a freakishly talented mathematician; a blind woman attuned to famous Australian poet Les Murray, himself autistic: a nonverbal man reared with extraordinary love by his mother. Never preaching, never even teaching, Tammet is a deeply sympathetic stylist whose nine stories all differ but all reinforce the central message of universality of love and connection and hope. Nine Minds is a special read, one I commend.

Just as one of his novelistic triumphs, Conclave, hits the big screen, Robert Harris offers us a seemingly fascinating but in the end bloodless stopgap novel, Precipice. It is based on the almost fantastical real-life letters, over three years, between manipulative, upper-class British Prime Minister Asquith, in his early sixties, and an attractive, aristocratic twenty-six-year-old, Venetia Stanley. The correspondence is almost brazen in its intensity and frequency, and clearly Asquith was besotted. Harris plonks this sexual obsession into the agonies of Britain stumbling into the horrors of World War I, using the device of an invented lowly intelligence officer assigned to surveil and eavesdrop, and, as ever, his plotting is first rate. So too is the weaving of fraught domestic and international politics into the mix, and the upper-class shenanigans of the ruling class. This overview of Precipice suggests a typical thrilling read of a Harris outing but unfortunately, the plot is uneventful, the characters seem removed from the reader, and the affair itself lacks any frisson on the page. As ever, Harris remains readable, but Precipice presents as a mere diversion.

Name me one writer/creator whose book/movie series extends over many outings who can sustain her creation’s energy in the long term… They do exist, those creators, but they are few and far between, and when Michael Connelly’s unreasonably durable Bosch book series morphed into the series about perky, corner-cutting LA defense lawyer Mickey Haller (yes, he occasionally drives a blue Lincoln), and both migrated to the screen, I for one predicted mundanity. The first two seasons of The Lincoln Lawyer crackled with energy, crime thrills, and motion (see my review of Season 1 and that of Season 2) but I almost skipped Season 3 because … well, because it would surely flag. Not at all. This time Haller finds an old client murdered and an innocent man framed for the crime, and in pursuing justice he brings down hell upon himself and nearly gives up trying for the truth. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo is note perfect as Mickey and the supporting cast around him does not miss a beat, but the real engine of this wonderful 10-episode show is the intelligent script powered by Michael Connelly’s intriguing book plot. If the genre of justice sought in and outside the courts, the legal crime fiction genre, appeals to you, Season 3 of The Lincoln Lawyer is happy viewing from start to finish.

A quixotic, very Irish stylist, Kevin Barry ran rampant in his brilliant 2019 novel, Night Boat to Tangier (see my review), and his stopgap short story collection, That Old Country Music (see my review), kept us from pining too much for his latest novel, The Heart in Winter. And what a treat this latest gothic western is! In 1891, a doomed, druggy, handsome young Irishman, marooned in Butte, Montana, falls hard for the new bride, arrived from the big smoke, of the town’s fanatically religious mining overlord. The two of them purloin a horse and lurch westward in a blur of love and lust. Sent to kill one and return the other are a scarcely believable trio of vigilante Cornish horrors. The author’s stylistics are so, so Irish and overt that every paragraph is a pleasure to the readerly eye, and his grip on the doomed-lovers plot is ironclad. If The Heart in Winter might strike some as almost a step too far in terms of outlandishness, it is, nonetheless, a triumph of style and substance over mundanity, and a pleasure to read.