Author: Andres Kabel

Bewitched by the writing and imaginativeness of Lavie Tidhar’s The Escapement (check out my rave review), I readily turned to “The Hood,” the second instalment of his Anti-Matter of Britain Quartet, being English mythology reimagined through a modern, bruising lens. This time, as the title implies, Tidhar refashions the tales of Robin Hood and his band of merry men, although “refashions” understates his reworkings, This is a profane, hip, super-cool, jazzed-up retelling that does not hesitate to turn everything on its head. Fast, funny, foul, and furious, The Hood will either captivate and amaze you, or it will turn you off before the midway point. Stylistically remarkable though it was, my own read had me gasping with admiration but a tad nonplussed, but hey, I read it in one setting and will remember it until the day I die.

Fresh from the triumph of his Hirsch trilogy set in the remote South Australian countryside, Garry Disher returns to his beloved Mornington Peninsula, a tongue of land between bay and ocean near Melbourne, in ”The Way It Is Now.” Policeman Charlie Deravin, newly parted from his wife and on enforced disciplinary leave from the sex-crimes unit, returns home to a beach shack. Like many crime fiction heroes, he is a mess, with one burden being the overhang from the never-solved disappearance of his mother two decades earlier. Surfing, just existing, this loose spirit idly digs into the past, until the day bodies turn up and the past catches up. Stylistically, The Way It Is Now feels nothing like the low-key lyricism of the South Australian series, it is much more muscular and adventurous, but a commonality is a wonderful immersion in the mystery’s locale, this time a mix of real Mornington Peninsula towns and suburbs, and some fictional ones. You can feel the sand, smell the salt. As ever, Disher’s control of the highly intriguing plot is masterful, never revealing too much, always keeping the reader on her toes. As ever, once begun, the book demands to be completed. One of the best global crime fiction novels of 2021, The Way It Is Now cements Disher’s crown as the best Australian mystery writer, bar none.

A rocket-paced tech sci-fi novel set in a near-enough-future world that could almost be familiar, “Noor” takes place in Nigeria and stars Anwuli Okwutility, a feisty woman who has augmented her body wth so much advanced technology that she relabels her initials AO as “artificial organism.” When an ordinary day spins out of control, she finds herself on the run in the deserts with another cutely named fugitive, a herdsman called DNA. AO and DNA careen through their weird world of ubiquitous surveillance and social media, huge wind turbines, a controlling mega corporation, and blazing technology. The author is richly inventive, the plot sucks the reader in, and the unusual (for sci-fi) setting is superbly drawn. Whilst this reader found the storyline baroque to the extent of reducing character immersion, another reader might sink right in. Noor is an enjoyable rollercoaster worth checking out.

“Double Blind” is my first Edward St Aubyn and I admit to intense anticipation. I quickly latched onto the author’s consummate lyrical skill, both descriptively rich and wondrously constructed. And the novel’s storyline holds great promise, bringing together an ecologist, psychologists, a rewilding environmentalist, a project planner, a maniacal venture capitalist, and a schizophrenic. Like, say, Richard Powers, St Aubyn revels in informing and exploring deep subject, and here he fossicks around in epigenetics, psychoanalysis, neurology, ecology, and oncology. The plot tumbles hither and thither, delightfully at first, and the characters are explored succinctly. If Double Blind refuses to follow traditional plot closure rules as the reader ends the end of her journey, this too seems wisely intelligent. A beguiling, off-kilter read.

Sherry Turkle has revolutionised our understanding of the role of the new IT and online communities, and, especially lately, the dangers of online interaction for psychological health. In “The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir,” she offers a beautifully, though simply, described memoir of the first phase of her life, narratively constructed as the interweaving of her intellectual journey with her childhood challenges and opportunities. What attracted me to read this was the promise of “the finding of meaning through a life’s work,” the telling of an existential trajectory carved out through Paris in 1968 and the IT revolution kicked off in the 70s and 80s. And the first two thirds of this heartfelt story was spellbinding, exploring her mother’s love and secretiveness, the quest to find (and then reject) her real father, all the while navigating the shoals of coming of age in one of the most tumultuous periods of human progress. In my reading, the final third sagged a little, mainly because the actual intellectual discourse under examination meant little to me, but at the end, I felt vindicated in reading The Empathy Diaries. If you are a nerd, not a jock (both appellations semi-jokingly offered), Sherry Turkle’s fulsome and yearning memoir may well speak volumes to you.

I missed the boat with “American Dirt,” possibly for the narrow-minded reason that I thought I knew all I need to know about the plight of Mexican refugees striving to pierce the U.S. border. I’m glad I finally succumbed to passionate word of mouth, for from the opening sentence, I was held captivated by Jeanine Cummins‘s uncanny brilliance and propulsive storytelling. The plot is both simple and endlessly complex: when an Acapulco bookshop owner is forever to flee, taking with her an eight-year-old son, she ends up joining the thousands and thousands of Mexicans and other South Americans wending their ways toward the border and then placing their lives in peril to attempt a border crossing. The author creates magic with an earnest but true-hearted style that never falters. Both the mother and the son are memorable characters, but there are many other splendid characterisations. The sense of place is exquisite. An ode to the capacity of human beings to hope and strive, as well as a searing indictment of this unfeeling world of ours, American Dirt is a readymade classic.

A trenchant satire marketed as a thriller, “How to Kidnap the Rich” follows a professional exam cheat in modern New Delhi, who has dragged himself out of the gutter in which his venal father dominated him. When a client student comes first in the national university exams and is an instant celebrity, Ramesh seizes a chance to reach the big time, only to be kidnapped and ransomed. Up until that point, the author offers a savage treatise on the modern Indian state, and also sets up the kidnapping well. As a deeply imagined character, Ramesh is brilliant, amoral as fuck but still somehow principled. But from then on the storyline devolves into an almost silly sequence of actions and double crosses. It’s as if the author set the whole thing in motion, then winged it. The postscript ending also irked me: “so what,” I found myself thinking. A book of two halves, How to Kidnap the Rich remains a propulsive, fascinating story.