Library Limelights 203

Vacation books ... sometimes limited comments and quotes.

J.G. Ballard. High Rise. 1975. UK: Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 2014.

Life in a brand new high rise apartment building, and its evolution/deconstruction into surreal chaos. First, the class distinctions (upper floor denizens exuding superiority), then the entire, bizarre, social breakdown. From the independent introduction to the book: "Arguably, High-Rise could just as well have been set in an internment camp, or for that matter a cruise ship or a medieval convent or any other self-contained community." It's a fascinating, chilling exploration of human nature.

Quotes:

➧ Many of the factors involved had long been obvious ‒ complaints about noise and the abuse of the building's facilities, rivalries over the better-sited apartments (those away from elevator lobbies and the service shafts, with their eternal rumbling). (28)

➧ The malicious humour, the eagerness to believe any piece of gossip and any tall story about the shiftlessness of the lower-floor tenants, or the arrogance of the upper-floor, had all the intensity of racial prejudice. (32)

➧ A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. (35)

➧ "Once we've gained a foothold there we can play these people off against those lower down - in short balkanize the centre section and then begin the colonization of the entire building ..." (91)

➧ Now the new order had emerged, in which all life in the high-rise revolved around three obsessions - security, food and sex. (136)

Laing, the medical researcher:

؞ As he walked across the parking-lot Laing looked back at the high-rise, aware that he was leaving part of his mind behind him. (35)

؞ The sweat on Laing's body, like the plaque that coated his teeth, surrounded him in an envelope of dirt and body odour, but the stench gave him confidence, the feeling that he had dominated the terrain with the products of his own body. (107)

؞ Laing knew that he was far happier now than ever before, despite all the hazards of his life, the likelihood that he would die at any time from hunger or assault. (154)

Laing's sister Alice:

؞ She referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. There was something in this feeling - the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain. (40)

؞ Trying to focus on him, her tired eyes drifted about in her head like lost fish. (148)

Neighbour Eleanor:

؞ Sober, she soon became tiresomely maudlin, wandering about the corridors in a vacant way as if she had lost the key to her own mind. (96)

Pangbourne, the gynecologist:

؞ His specialty was the computerized analysis of recorded birth-cries, from which he could diagnose an infinity of complaints to come. He played with these tapes like an earlier generation of sorcerer examining the patterns of entrails. (83)

Wilder, the filmmaker:

؞ He welcomed this forced conscription of the deviant strains in his character. Happily, this free and degenerate behaviour became easier the higher he moved up the building, as if encouraged by the secret logic of the high-rise. (120-1)

Mick Herron. Why We Die. 2006. NY: Soho Press, 2016.

Third in the author's Zöe Boehm series, Herron just gets better and better ... and that was over a decade ago. Death is a theme here, but much more philosophical than morbid. "Enquiries agent" Zöe is hired by a jeweller to recover goods stolen from his shop. That's the only straightforward occurrence in this tale. She is randomly sucked into the vortex of two criminal but clumsy Dunstan brothers who vow vengeance on Katrina (aka Kay) Blake, the wife of their third brother, Baxter. Because Katrina stabbed Baxter to death. And there's Tim Whitby, witness to the effects of abuse against Katrina, coming to life out of his depression, determined to save her. Arkle and Trent Dunstan also seek the substantial monetary proceeds of their robberies, squirrelled away by Baxter in some unknown place.

Arkle is a psychopath with a deadly crossbow; he employs a great deal of italics in his speech. Trent is a drunk with a limited IQ. Zöe also has problems with Bob Poland the vicious ex-cop of novels past. She meets Win, the human bulldozer, and Katrina's senile father. In all the crisscrossing confrontations and race for the money, will Zöe die this time? Thoughts of mortality sometimes engulf her as she frantically works her way through this very Herron-esque tangle of memorable characters.

One-liners:

▪ Since giving up smoking she'd been hungry all the time, and rumour had it apples were healthy. (58)

▪ For half a second he wondered what his colleagues would have made of it: Tim on his day off, miles from home, looking to break into a house in search of a woman he'd met once. (91)

▪ Girls looked at Baxter like they couldn't work out if he was a threat or a promise, but wouldn't mind trying. (98)

▪ Things weren't always better with coffee, but they were reliably worse without it. (219)

Multi-liners:

▪ The English were supposed to be repressed―beaten to a pulp by the weather and an ineradicable sense of loss of empire. So why was everyone so bloody cheerful? (7)

▪ Joe had never lacked principles. Common sense, yes, but not principles. But the thing about Joe was, he was dead. (28)

▪ It was possible Trent was more observant than he was, just like it was possible that we'd be visited by intelligent life, or the Tories would win an election. (96-7)

▪ Death was the dark outside. It didn't matter how long you lived, the dark was always longer. (100)

Her cancer scare:

In her good moments, Zöe worried she'd allow a few bad months to turn her into a health zombie. And the rest of the time, she took her pulse and checked the calendar and carried on giving up smoking ... And besides, and besides, and besides. There were many possible futures, and one of them was hers. Positive thinking only took you so far. You could look on the bright side—that it was the knowledge of inevitable closure that made the remainder sweet. That the trite was also true: all good things come to an end. That this was the natural state of things, and nature must have its way. And that two positives don't make a negative. Yeah, right. 

Or you could carry on being yourself, and try to put what lay ahead behind you. Which was her current plan. (42-3)

Arkle's assessment:

Baxter had been the smart one, able to work through the logistics of a given situation to the satisfaction of the important parties. And Trent generally managed to do what he was told. He could, for instance, carry heavy stuff a lot further than you'd imagine, given what a fucking dwarf he was. As for Arkle ... Arkle, to get to the point, was a creative genius. (152)

Hello, Win:

This had been a small waste of time, except a leather-clad arm snaked around her waist and lifted her off the ground―fuck, she was dangling mid-air, her breathing cut off. ... 

Black spots blossomed before Zöe's eyes, and burst into sausage-shaped rainbows. 

"I'll hurt you exactly as much as I need to," a voice said, for a moment Zöe wondered where it was coming from: it was too high too squeaky too― 

"Until you tell me who you are and why you were following me." 

―fuck, too much of a woman to be the man suspending her like this. Except that's who it was: the man was a woman. A six-foot barrel-built woman, with arms like branches and a voice like David Beckham on helium. (75-6)

Arkle's brain:

He'd come up here for words with old man Blake: find out what Kay had told him; discover what hints she'd dropped. She was a woman, everyone was agreed on that. Women dropped hints. This was practically a natural law. So Arkle had been sure Blake would know what had happened to the money; Arkle was dead certain Kay would have told him. It occurred to him now to wonder about the source of this certainty, and wondering was like running full tilt into a wall. Why was he sure? He just was, that was all. When Arkle had an idea, the important thing about it was this: it was his idea. If it didn't work out he was going to have to come up with another one, and it wasn't like the fuckers grew on trees. (141)

Menace v. courage:

Arkle undid another button. "So now I know where she isn't," he said. "Where is she?""She's staying out of your way," Zöe said. "I'm all you get." (245)

Craig Russell. Dead Men and Broken Hearts. UK: Quercus, 2016.

Enquiries agent Lennox the expat Canadian is in trouble again; his landlady/lover Fiona has rejected him. Not only that, two new cases that look relatively simple are going to confound him and land him in jail on a murder charge. The suspicious wife of Andrew Ellis hires Lennox to follow her husband; a local union hires him secretly to locate Frank Lang, an employee who absconded with much cash and confidential ledgers. Lennox needs all the help he can get from his assistant Archie and a reformed heavy-duty enforcer named Twinkletoes McBride as each case turns highly unexpected corners. The industrial essence of 1956 Glasgow broods and simmers over all.

After a harrowing escape from prison, Lennox pulls himself together to hunt a killer, resolve some identity issues, confront Fiona's change of heart, and plan his own removal to Canada. Refugees from the aborted Hungarian revolution and other mysterious officials sidetrack his mission. The climax in the Scottish highlands falls a bit flat, somehow, failing to reach the proper heights of the foregoing buildup. Yet Lennox's black humour always redeems. One of his acquaintances observes that dead men and broken hearts could be Lennox's motto. Interestingly, a minor character is portrayed as real-life serial killer Peter Manuel, who was the subject of Denise Mina's fiction in The Long Drop.

One-liners:

▪ Ten years of living in Scotland had shown me the Scots were world champions at keeping a lid on emotions. (7)

▪ Mine was the only car in a grey-black tenement-lined street that had the picturesque charm of an abbatoir yard. (25)

▪ Apart from the small inconvenience of being a wanted man on the run, dressed in a prison outfit, hunted by the police and without any kind of footwear, it was all going swimmingly. (269)

▪ I had once visited Fifeshire, because I had had to ‒ which was the only reason anyone ever visited Fifeshire. (405)

Multi-liners:

▪ McBride devoted hours each day to reading. Sometimes as many as two pages in one day. (43)

▪ I didn't mention that the real reason I couldn't get involved was because she had invited me to test out their marital bedsprings. Which could make things complicated. (81)

▪ "But I've given you my word and I'm a Canadian. We make Boy Scouts and Quakers look like ne'er-do-wells." (147)

▪ "You just have to trust me. I'm Canadian after all. The clean living and maple syrup makes us grow up straight and true." (378)

▪ It was the strangest thing: to feel nothing beneath the wheels. To know you were in a motor car suspended in space. (394)

Hoisting a few:

When I walked into the Horsehead it was packed. This was called a 'lock-in' and all of these good citizens were, in the eyes of the licensing establishment, bona fide 'guests of the management.' It was the job of the police to make sure that this was the case and that the till, whose drawer had been left open, did not accept cash for drinks. From the number of uniformed and plainclothes coppers propping up the bar, it was a responsibility the City of Glasgow police clearly took very seriously. And they were putting the bar staff to the test by accepting pints and shorts without paying for them. Funny thing was, something always seemed to distract their attention at those crucial moments when other 'guests of the management' handed over cash. (29)

Thickening the plot:

"I just thought it was quite a coincidence ... that you gave me two names to check out and it turns out that they're both Hungarian." 

I thought about what Taylor had told me. I took a couple of leisurely draws on my cigarette before answering. 

"It is, isn't it?" (119)

Twinkletoes at his best:

He sat for a minute, the frown still creasing his almost-brow. He was silent and completely still, even his eyes focused but not focused on the stove. In McBride's case, cogitation clearly necessitated the shutting down of all other functions. 

Then, suddenly, he reached out and snatched up the car key I had left on the table. 

"What's up, Twinkle?" 

"Listen, Mr L. You're a nice man. Maybe too nice. You need answers, right?" 

"Right." 

Well, getting answers is my business. I'm sticking with you." 

I didn't argue. A resolved Twinkletoes McBride wasn't something you argued with, like you wouldn't argue with a steam hammer. 

The thought of him riding shotgun while I got to the bottom of what the hell was going on troubled me greatly. But, oddly enough, it also comforted me. (294-5)