by John Grant
—Infinity Plus
A Season for the Dead
by David Hewson
Delacorte, 400 pages, hardback, 2004
and
Lucifer's Shadow
by David Hewson
Delacorte, 384 pages, hardback, 2004
There are plenty of good reasons not to read The Da Vinci Code, and here are two of them. The similarities with Dan Brown's international bestseller are not in fact too great, but both of these books by Hewson concern ancient and modern conspiracies, one of them is centred on shenanigans within the Catholic Church, and so on. Both are in strict point of fact mystery novels, but both so far transcend any genre considerations – and are so beautifully, lovingly written – that they demand serious attention as mainstream literary novels. Arriving in quick succession here for review, they together offered this reviewer what was probably his most rewarding reading experience of 2004.
A Season for the Dead opens with a spectacular scene in the Vatican Reading Room. Professor Sara Farnese is trying to work there when a gun-brandishing fellow professor, Stefano Rinaldi, appears and proceeds to unfold in front of her a recently flayed human skin. Before he can explain too much to her, he is shot dead as a dangerous madman by an over-zealous Swiss Guard. Soon afterward, the discovery is made in a nearby church of a pair of mutilated corpses.
The Vatican does its best to divert the investigation mounted by the Roman police, but reckons without the cop called in to straddle the sensitive line between the two jurisdictions. That cop is young Nic Costa, a delightful mixture of aesthetic connoisseur and unreconstructed macho Italian male who probably gets his doggedness from his gritty father, a major figure in the old-time Italian Communist setup. While the bodies pile up and senior Vatican figures do everything in their power to alter accepted reality in the hope that Nic will either run down the blind alleys they temptingly open for him or allow his palm to be greased, his probing slowly zeroes in on the activities of a privately disgraced American cardinal, Michael Denney.
A far greater distraction to Nic's investigation is offered by Sara Farnese, who likewise seems central to the conspiracy in that many of the dead have been her lovers. Much of the emotional dynamic of the novel's plot concerns Nic's attempts to reconcile his strong attraction – both physical and, more important, personal – to the professor with the progressive revelation of the full extent of her astonishingly prolific sex life. He must learn to accept that the woman with whom he has fallen in love is the person she is, not the person he might have wanted the love of his life to be.
There is much of the feel of John Fowles's The Magus to Hewson's A Season for the Dead, as various eminences grises attempt to bamboozle him with smoke and mirrors, and the sense of thwarted eroticism, which Hewson handles with exquisite delicacy, has an echo not just of that novel but also the same author's The French Lieutenant's Woman. Hewson, like Fowles, is concerned not just with the overt mystery, the mystery of the plot's events, but also with deeper, less tangible mysteries that his hero – and perhaps the reader – will perhaps never fully solve. How, for example, does Caravaggio, the 16th-/17th-century murderer-painter with whose life and works Nic is near-obsessed, fit into the tapestry of present-day murders and conspiracies?
The second of these two novels, Lucifer's Shadow, again has some similarities with The Magus. Young Daniel Forster is hired from England to Venice to catalogue the library of a private collector ... or, at least, that's why he thinks he has been employed. It soon becomes clear to him that there are undercurrents of motivation at play among his employer's intimate circle, but it will be a long time before Daniel – and ourselves – can discover what is truly going on. The term "god game" has been used to describe fictions whose protagonists are in effect being manipulated, unknown to them, by the invisible strings of covert puppeteers around them. In Lucifer's Shadow Daniel is the innocent victim of a god game.
But are the puppeteers benign or malicious? This cannot be known without the telling of a parallel story. In 1733 young Lorenzo Scacchi, ancestor of Daniel's enigmatic employer, comes to Venice to find himself likewise ensnared in a god game ... and also in love, love with a beautiful composer whose work can never be publicly recognized because of her double disqualification in being both a woman and a Jew. Yet there is at least the possibility that Rebecca's masterpiece might be performed, so that it can receive the public acclaim it deserves, even if she cannot be acknowledged as its composer; and a conspiracy to that end is mounted involving not just Lorenzo and Rebecca but also the great showman-conductor-composer Vivaldi. But one of the conspiracy's architects has, unknown to anyone else, a quite different agenda – a murderous one.
The two tales of murder and conspiracy, separated by the best part of three centuries, are complexly – and masterfully – intertwined, and both are populated by quite exquisitely realized characters. Both stories are complicated in themselves, presenting mysteries whose development becomes only gradually apparent; but the true, overarching mystery can be understood only by the solution of both tales.
A Season for the Dead and Lucifer's Shadow are each a mightily impressive achievement. Reading either one alone offers a delicious feast at both emotional and intellectual levels. Reading the two novels one soon after the other might almost create a sensory overload ... Ah, but what a delicious overload it is.
—Crescent Blues
Supping with Panthers
by Tom Holland
Little, Brown, 432 pages, hardback, 1996
Recursive fantasy-horror is a dangerous game to play: it can either be lots of fun – as in Mark Frost's The List of 7, which mixes Arthur Conan Doyle, Helena Blavatsky, Adolf Hitler and the model for Sherlock Holmes with a hideous occult conspiracy – or it can seem like a routine exercise, an act of literary cleverness. Supping with Panthers, which inhabits very much the same territory as Frost's book, is exceptionally well written and contains passages of stunningly vivid imagery, but eventually the confection of Byron, Oscar Wilde, Jack the Ripper, Bram Stoker and others with bloodthirsty vampirism begins to – it is hard to resist the word – coagulate. There are Holmesian echoes here as well – the central character studied at Edinburgh under the same tutor as did Doyle. In fact, after reading about two-thirds of this long book I felt I was eating a stew into which too many ingredients had been put.
To summarize the plot in its most basic form, Dr John Eliot, a specialist in haematology, discovers the truth about vampirism while serving with the British Army in a remote province of India. Once he is back in London, his acquaintances become the victims of vampiristic killings, and he is persuaded to investigate the case. This he does, and in the course of doing so discovers the ghastly truth about himself.
Holland is an extremely good writer, and his depiction of some of the characters – especially Stoker – is fine, but his revelling in the joys of recursiveness stops his tale from being properly told. In the end, I tired of the book even while continuing to admire its many good qualities.
—Samhain
Sense of Evil
by Kay Hooper
Bantam, 352 pages, hardback, 2003
This is the latest offering in Kay Hooper's Bishop series based on the premise that the FBI has an underpublicized division of psychic crimefighters, headed by the eponymous psychic and his wife Miranda. The early entries in the series more directly involved these two, and were in their way very engaging; this most recent volume, the sixth, focuses instead on the exploits of more junior agents of the division.
In the small South Carolina town of Hastings there is a serial killer on the loose, taking as his victims beautiful blonde women who are successful in their chosen professions. Hunky Police Chief Rafe Sullivan is at a loss as to how to stop the murders, and is grateful when the FBI sends in one of its top profilers, Isabel Adams. The only trouble is that of course she's beautiful, blonde and successful in her own profession. The pair being almost instantly smitten by each other's charms, Rafe's instincts are
to protect the woman he is swiftly coming to love, but all the indications are that she is better able to protect herself than he is. Further, she's not the only member of the FBI's psychic team in town.
Their investigation reveals that not all of the victims have been as pure as the driven snow. They unearth a sordid pattern of sadomasochistic prostitution and probable blackmail – looking at tranquil Hastings, whodathunkit? It soon becomes evident that the killer, who in exhibitionist fashion seems to delight in committing further murders despite the spotlights having been switched on, is fully aware of the danger Isabel represents, and has added her to the list of future targets. But she is of stern stuff, and will not relinquish the pursuit ...
It's obvious from the first pages that Hooper knows her craft – but knows it too well. There's a Prologue that could have come from just about any psychic-serial-killer thriller, and most of the rest of the novel follows much the same pattern: we keep reading because there's no good reason to stop rather than because of any surprises, fresh ideas or thrills. The resolution of the mystery – the revelation of the serial killer's identity – involves such prime hokum that one doesn't know whether to giggle or throw the book at the wall. It's no wonder Hooper embellished the main plot with all the subplotting about kinkiness beneath the town's innocuous surface; these embellishments she handles pretty well, thereby lifting the book from the rut in which it might otherwise have gotten itself irremediably stuck.
Sense of Evil is not by any means an out-and-out bad book, and in many ways it succeeds in its intention to pass the reader's time. But it seems to be a book entirely without ambition, the literary analog of a completed paint-by-numbers picture hanging on a friend's wall: you can compliment the friend on the skill, patience and care used to apply the colours, but as to the artwork's originality ...
—Crescent Blues
The Program
by Greg Hurwitz
Morrow, 368 pages, hardback, 2004
Your local bookstore is piled high with novels that, however sleekly and professionally they may serve their purpose as nail-bitingly suspenseful thrillers, are essentially no more than empty-headed entertainment. This is no criticism of them: they achieve superbly what it is they set out to do, which is to make you read far later into the night than you should. Thereafter, of course, you forget all about them ... with the eventual result, after you've read a bunch of such entertainments in a row, that you have the embarrassment of picking one of them up and being unable to remember whether or not you've read it.
Nothing could be further from the case with the suspense novels of Greg Hurwitz. What truly distinguishes them from the herd is that not only are they first-rate thrillers, brilliantly eliciting all the requisite pulse-pounding, but that they have subtexts – agendas, even – in which the profounder implications of an ethical or other premise are rigorously thought through. In Hurwitz's previous novel, The Kill Clause, protagonist Tim Rackley, unjustly ousted from the US Marshals Service, falls into the hands of a clique dedicated to inflicting capital punishment upon perceived scum who have escaped justice through the exploitation of a flawed and/or corrupt judicial system, which the clique regards as over-liberal. So, too, does an embittered Rackley, and he carries out a few "executions" on the clique's behalf. But then doubts set in, especially when he becomes convinced of one of the targets' innocence; and he discovers he has been manipulated into murder by clique members with a reprehensible secret scheme of their own. The novel's net effect is to offer a critique of popular attitudes toward capital punishment: Rackley is educated into the realization that the death penalty is as vile as the crimes it purports to avenge.
In The Program the focus of the subtext seems to be on our preconception that people's religious or quasi-religious beliefs, however asinine, should be respected – should be sacrosanct as a personal matter, and thus immune from criticism. The flaw in such apparently laudable tolerance is that those beliefs may in themselves be damaging or indeed dangerous to others. In course of exploring this territory through the medium of Rackley's penetration of a viciously grasping cult, The Program, in order to try to rescue from it the daughter of a wealthy Hollywood producer, Hurwitz provides us with an astonishing amount of fascinating information on the techniques used by such cults first to snare and indoctrinate their victims, then – psychologically, physically, or both – to ensure that it's virtually impossible for said victims ever to escape.
Rackley is lured back into the Marshals Service at the behest of fantastically rich movie producer Will Henning, whose daughter Leah has vanished into The Program. At first Rackley resists, resenting (as he should) the fact that Henning's wealth alone gives the man extra-legal influence; but soon he is caught up in the attempt to counter the devastation the cult is causing to numerous human lives as it uses indoctrinative techniques to separate the gullible from their worldly goods. At the heart of The Program is its leader, the carefully self-recreated Messiah figure T.D. Betters who, surrounded by "handmaidens" and thuggish, vicious bodyguards, is seemingly unassailable by US law; those who lose everything they own to the cult, including most of all their souls, are, after all, supposedly adults of sound mind acting of their own free will. Leah, the initial reason for Rackley's infiltration of the cult, becomes instead – even while he becomes emotionally bonded with the young woman – the tool he might be able to use to bring about the cult's downfall.
Perhaps the most chilling and memorable sections of this always absorbing novel – it constantly runs through one's mind that The Program is as effective at snaring people as is the eponymous cult! – are those in which Rackley subjects himself to the cult's induction sessions, secure in the knowledge that he will be able to come through mentally unaffected because of the strength of his own will and the tuition given to him by a broken man who has succeeded in making his escape, albeit at the cost of nearly destroying himself. Rackley's confidence in his own resilience, he finds, may well have been misplaced ...
Of course, the cult turns out to have far more lethal methods at its disposal to keep its adherents in line than merely indoctrination, as Rackley eventually discovers. Even then, because of the inhibiting nature of the laws pertaining to claimed religions, however phony, morally obscene and exploitative these may be, it is difficult to find a way of pinning the murders to the actual perpetrators, the cult's leaders.
As with The Kill Clause before it, The Program delivers the full-scale edge-of-the-seat-emotional-rollercoaster experience one demands from the very best suspense thrillers, but it's the gritty fibre of its ethico-philosophical underpinning that makes it an unforgettable novel, one that merits rereading. This is la crème de la crème indeed.
—Crescent Blues
Timeshift
by Phillip Ellis Jackson
AmErica House, 211 pages, paperback, 2001
"The year is 2416. Mankind is slowly coming to terms with the terrifying reality that, as a race, it is moving toward extinction. Three hundred and fifty years earlier the country divided into two cooperative, but separate nations – the East and West United States. A brief nuclear exchange involving remnants of the old Soviet empire gave rise to a deadly new lifeform – a toxic, self-replicating, indestructible ash."
In the grand tradition of R. Lionel Fanthorpe comes Phillip Ellis Jackson's first novel, heralding what is promised to be a trilogy.
Our descendants live underground, hoping to reclaim their world (which is coextensive with today's USA) through eliminating the ash, a task they hope to accomplish by exploiting the properties of Beta Light. "Beta Light?" you ask with a quizzical crossing of the eyes. Well:
Scientists discovered that after leaving the sun, Alpha Light – the spectrum ranging from infrared to ultraviolet – split off and continued on into space while a new, hitherto unknown companion particle, Beta Light, was trapped in a sediment-like swirl by the earth's magnetic field. Because of its unique properties, Beta Light acted like a recording film capturing the images of the past exactl
y as they happened – sights, sounds, everything just as it was. Man could view the past, but not interact with it. Still, it was enough to replay the 3-D holographic images they retrieved, allowing the people of the present to share in a life that once was, and might never again be.
As a wacky-physics sf premise, this is only about one order of magnitude wackier than Bob Shaw's "slow glass", a concept with which, in terms of potential for story development, it can be directly compared. Thanks to advanced technology, people can be sent on "jumps" into the layers of Beta Light that surround the earth rather like the rings of a tree; there they can record the past. The hope is that, by dint of detailed historical research, they can pinpoint the moment in time when either the precursor of that ash was invented as an item in the biological-warfare arsenal or the "cure" for it was invented by the long-dead scientist Audrey York. Or something like that: this is a novel in which it is easy to lose track.
There's not a lot of crime in the 25th century for the obvious reason that "jumps" can be made back to the moment of perpetration and the criminals thereby readily identified.
Paul Thorndyke is the up-and-comer in B.E.T.A., one of the three all-American corporations that control access to Beta Light. A member of the company for only a couple of weeks, he is visibly such a leader and genius that he is asked to stand in for B.E.T.A. boss Scott Hollock as witness of the most important "jump" yet, back to the moment when past US President Peter Haley authorized the development of York's work; if the establishment where that further research was done can only be pinpointed, the reasoning goes, then future "jumpers" can be sent to spy on what went on and thereby discover how to neutralize the killer ash.
Oh, yes, B.E.T.A. stands for Betalight Electromagnetic Technology Applications. The other two companies are P.A.S.T. – "Particle Accelerator Shuttle Transmission" – and T.I.M.E. – "Transitional Insertion Management Enterprise". Each of these three handles a different aspect of the effort to exploit Beta Light. Clearly it'd be a good idea if the three corporations could be unified; and this is the aim of various criminals in high places who realize that the person at the helm of the unified corporation could also be (cackle, cackle, cackle, Mr Bond) the ruler of the world. The high-echelon nasties are assisted in their wheeze by the fact that the brilliant mathematician Harman Bright, who has devised a way of altering Beta Light images (so folk can be framed for crimes they didn't commit, and thus be got out of the way), is not only a brilliant mathematician but a cheery little psychopath: anyone looks as if they're cottoning on to the nefariousness all around and Harman Bright can either snuff them or/and fake up the scene of a snuffing so that the threatening individual is instantly convicted of murder, on Beta Light evidence, and condemned to death.