Library Limelights 210

Chris Pavone. The Travelers. USA: Crown Publishers/Penguin Random House, 2016.

Leaping from one cliffhanger to another, here’s a breathless travelogue. Malcolm, the editor of a popular travel magazine, has deep secrets in his New York office that interest the CIA ~ or is it the CIA? Malcolm and everyone contributing to or associated with the magazine is a suspicious character: Will, the travel writer; Chloe, his unhappy wife; Gabriella, the deputy editor; Stonely, the computer nerd. Then we have Elle, the mysterious spy, Malcom’s restless wife Allison, and even more. After one particular night in Argentina, Elle recruits an entrapped Will for the CIA; he is to report on important people he meets regularly on his magazine assignments in high society gatherings ‒ politicians, captains of industry, celebrities – to be analyzed for potential personal vulnerabilities. He goes to a CIA training farm ‒ easy to explain his absence as another travel assignment – yet he doesn’t understand what value he has for them.

Allison gets involved in an affair to Malcolm’s dismay. Signs indicate that his clandestine activities are unravelling. And the reluctant Will learns something that sets him off on his own path to find a so-called traitor in Scandinavia. Chloe disappears, so does Allison’s lover, and now Will. The truth of all this frantic activity is revealed only in small doses; each character of course is hiding something. Who are the real spies? Who is tracking whom? A surprise identity is disclosed in the final moments, a surprise only to those who’ve read Pavone’s preceding novel The Accident (LL205). Characterization is one of the author’s most appealing skills. A true thriller, it’s very complicated, it’s exciting, even though the occasional suspension of disbelief may arise. Pavone has to be ranked as a master of the genre.

One-liners:

▪ “I’m at my most productive when seized by financial panic in the middle of the night.” (41)

▪ Marina Delgado is the name she’s using here in Italy; that’s even what she’s calling herself in her head. (68)

▪ This is the ultimate walk of shame, coming home from the stupidest mistake of his life. (94)

▪ Will feels his foot tapping under the table, nerves from this lying he’s doing, one lie after another. (96)

▪ He has had more truthful, more personal, and more frequent conversations with his case officer than with his wife. (178)

▪ Walking through a hotel lobby, carrying no luggage, she always feels at least a little like a hooker. (354)

Multi-liners:

▪ It’s surprising how much of his job is about staying up very late, drinking alcohol, with strangers. Maybe that’s all jobs. (42)

▪ “You’ll become an asset of the CIA, Will Rhodes. Or we’ll ruin your life.” (86)

▪ “And you know what, Will? Everyone is corruptible. So don’t beat yourself up.” (115)

▪ Gabriella is standing in Malcolm’s door, arms crossed, projecting hostility and disappointment. Even though Malcolm is her boss, Gabriella seems determined to try to undermine the hierarchy of that relationship, every day, in every way. (123)

▪ Elle is no longer worried about getting killed by this man. Now she’s worried about getting killed by everyone else involved. (373)

▪ She’d previously assumed that her employer is a supergreedy amoral capitalist. But now she understands him to be a stupendously devious megalomaniac. (379)

Long-term goals:

Will wants everything to be perfect. He wants the perfect wife, the perfect kids, the perfect old townhouse, perfectly restored, where he’ll serve perfect food accompanied by perfect wines in perfect glasses. He wants his suit to be perfectly tailored, his shoes perfectly shined. He wants the hotel room to be perfect, the overnight train ride, the local tour guide. And he has made the relentless pursuit of perfection his career.But perfection is always over the next horizon. The next job, the next meal, the next trip. Next year, or maybe the year after. (33-4)

Magazine politics:

Gabriella is pretty sure he’s still lying. But now isn’t the time to confront him, and she’s probably not the one to do it. 

It’s a peculiar relationship between colleagues who are similar ages, with similar levels of experience, similar job responsibilities: sometimes allies, but also rivals. People can talk about teams, but every colleague is one of three things: a boss, an underling, or a rival. Will is neither a boss nor an underling. (204)

Elle spins Will:

“You’re completely honest with your wife?” 

“I used to be.” 

“Bullshit. Everyone is acting all the time. Smiling and laughing, great to meet you, that’s awesome. Wearing this and not that, keeping quiet when you want to scream, saying things you know aren’t true. You do it every day, Will, and you did it before you ever met me. We all do. That’s what keeps society going. That’s what life is. Acting.” 

“You are one fucked-up person.” 

“Maybe. But who isn’t?” 

“Oh, whatever. You know what? I’ve had enough of this. Of you. I don’t believe a damn thing you say about anything, and I don’t think you have any idea what the hell you’re doing, and you’re going to get me killed. I’m out.” (208)

Yrsa Sigurdardottir. The Undesired. 2013. UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015.

In his new job, Ódinn is directed to investigate the long-closed Krokur Home for young offenders, an isolated farm; old rumours of abuse have reached his social services agency. The caretakers at Krokur appear to have been careless and mean, and the deaths of two boys at the time beg further examination. It was a long time ago; only a few “witnesses” are still living. Personally, Odinn is struggling with the tragic death of his ex-wife and the sudden full-time care of his traumatized eleven-year-old daughter Rún. Two threads then: Ódinn’s present, and the 1974 past, represented by Aldis, the home’s young cleaner. Aldis is attracted to Einar, an older delinquent at Krokur; no good will come of that, we know.

Aldis discovers all her missing letters that her employers have withheld. Then yes, clever surprises do come late in the story, on both levels. For me it was hard slogging through flat prose and introspective gloom (so what did I expect in Iceland?!). Everyone seems spooked. Hints of horror never physically materialize; the real horror is in the mixed signals they all give out. But some lack of character definition, and their tedious indecisiveness for the most part, did not encourage empathy — it just made me impatient to finish the book. Ódinn is perhaps the most naive, trusting figure of all.

One-liners:

▪ He sympathised with his daughter: her grandmother was eaten up with bitterness, so he almost never put pressure on her to go round. (63)

▪ “Being here’s like being shut in a box, like being snatched out of your life and put in storage.” (79)

▪ What was she thinking of embarking on such a mission, alone under the stars? (262)

▪ Someone always gets punished when a crime is committed, but not always the guilty party. (336)

Multi-liners:

▪ Don’t answer. Your life will never be the same. Don’t answer. (31)

▪ “Don’t like taking pills. I just put up with sleeping badly.” (103)

▪ “But I’m prepared to do whatever’s necessary to help her get over it.” Except see a psychoanalyst. Or take tablets. (106-7)

▪ “She asked loads of questions about you, like if you had a girlfriend. She does fancy you.”(167)

▪ Odinn didn’t dare ask about her illness. The woman was such a bizarre mixture of formality and candour. (300)

The Home:

“Do you know anything about him?” Aldis added, so as not to seem curt. Not that she had the slightest interest in the boy. They turned up, full of anger, creating all kinds of scenes, but their cockiness was quick to wear off. Even the most highly strung and violent were crushed in the end by the futility of the place. They received no visits and no letters. And nor did she. (20)

Family duties:

The lift never worked, but father and daughter didn’t mind the stairs since the shopping bag was light, containing nothing but flat-cakes, butter and cheese for Rún’s packed lunch. Ódinn hadn’t yet got the hang of organising the food shopping for the week, so was forever having to pop out for small purchases and then again for things he had forgotten. He’d learn eventually, as he would in all the other areas of their life that required improvement. (31)

Aldis feeling trapped:

She had never felt any desire for alcohol before: it tasted vile and she didn’t enjoy feeling drunk and talking crap. Not as a rule. But at this moment it felt appropriate. Even if it led her to do something she’d regret. Though it was hard to imagine what could make her position worse than it already was. (157)

Colleague Dilja goofed:

“There was no need to tell my daughter about those boys dying in the car.” Ódinn folded his arms to stop himself losing his cool and wagging his finger in Dilja’s face. He was trembling with rage, justifiably incensed that someone would upset his child. “What possessed you? She’s got enough on her plate without hearing something like that.” The child’s phobia about open windows was bad enough; he didn’t want her refusing to get in the car as well. (162)

Waubgeshig Rice. Moon of the Crusted Snow. Toronto: ECW Press, 2018.

Imagine your small isolated town caught in endless winter—face-freezing temperatures, howling winds, five feet of snow and counting―with no hydro, no fuel, and no working communications. Welcome to the future. Rice’s beautifully understated account is a sober microcosm of planet change, or apocalypse, as some start calling it. The Native population of this town slowly adapts to frigid, stormy weather, calling on tribal memory to return to age-old ways but not without consequences. Evan is our altruistic narrator watching the community pull together for the most part. Families have always traditionally helped each other with necessities; ultimately all are dependent on emergency rations dealt out under the band council’s supervision.

They soon learn that the closest big town is in the same frozen strait, with riots and chaos taking over. For all they know, the whole country, the whole world, is dying. The death count rises. Chief Terry is at a loss to manage the most frightened ones, the weak and greedy, who find a different leadership in Scott—the non-Native who arrived in a blizzard, requesting refuge with them. A showdown forced by Evan and his friends suppresses the hostile minority but does nothing to alter nature’s implacable fury and the dwindling/failing food supply. But Evan and his wife Nicole remain pragmatic.

Isaiah Walter

One-liners:

▪ He finished his prayer with a resounding, solitary miigwech before putting the tobacco on the ground in front of the moose. (5)

▪ “As the old saying goes,” Evan began sternly, “come in peace or leave in pieces.” (100)

▪ People are going to shit themselves if they see this big fuckin’ white guy out and about.” (109)

▪ Somehow Evan had known that the cigarettes and free-flowing booze would lead back to Scott. (131)

Multi-liners:

▪ This was his offering of gratitude to the Creator and Mother Earth for allowing him to take this life. As he took from the earth, he gave back. It was the Anishinaabe way, as he understood it. (5)

▪ The cell tower had gone up only a few years before, when the community was finally connected to the power grid. Even then it only happened because the construction contractors from the South wanted a good signal while they built the massive new hydro dam farther north on the bay. (14)

▪ He was a beast of a man who was invading his people’s space. (100)

▪ “This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here.” (149)

Chief panicking:

“Terry, relax. We’ll be okay,” said Walter. 

“That’s easy for you to say. I’m supposed to be the goddamn leader here! What am I gonna do, deliver these bullshit pieces of paper to every single fuckin’ home on this rez and tell everyone it’s gonna be okay? We have no goddamn answers.” 

“Terry, take it easy ...” It was Amanda’s turn to try to calm the chief. 

“There’s something seriously fucked up going on out there. Why haven’t we heard from anyone? Why is the power still off? If we run out of that diesel, all the water lines are gonna freeze. Then it’s gonna be fuckin’ chaos here.” Terry slammed his fist against the desk. “Fuck!” (66)

Walking in deep snow:

He kicked up frozen shrapnel each time he raised a foot. A fine powder lay underneath. The conditions made him think of the specific time of year. There’s a word for this, he thought, trying to remember with each high step across the hard snow. His knees raised as if to rev his mind into higher gear. He looked up to the lumpy clouds in the hope that the word would emerge like a ray of sunlight through overcast sky. 

“Onaabenii Giizis,” he proudly proclaimed out loud. “The moon of the crusted snow.”...

He had stopped counting the days and weeks long ago. There was no point anymore knowing if it was Tuesday the twenty-first of whatever. All that mattered was getting through each season and preparing for the next. 

Now the milestones he used to mark time were the deaths in the community. (152-3)

An elder dies:

Evan stepped over to Aileen’s body and waited for Tyler to follow. His mind swirled as they fitted her into place at the end of the row. She blended in, already anonymous. It didn’t feel right to either of them to just leave her there. 

Where’s her spirit? Evan thought. Is she on her way to the spirit world? Is she stuck here? She needs to be on her journey. This isn’t right. His throat tightened and his eyes watered. 

He shook off grief, and anger returned. “Let’s go see Scott,” he said. 

“Shouldn’t we go talk to Walter or someone?” asked Tyler. 

“No, they won’t listen to us. They’ll just call another damn meeting and do nothing. This is up to us.” (197)