Library Limelights 222

CORONAVIRUS TIMES, continued. Alas, pulling quotes means interrupting to write a sentence or two by hand, not conducive to a relaxing read. Midway along here, my lazy brain figured out where the page numbers are. In theory, I can return to them once I’ve finished the book.

Alafair Burke. The Better Sister, 2019. Electronic edition (ebook), download from Toronto Public Library. Originally published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2019.

Two sisters and one husband with a teenaged son make a provocative study in family dynamics. Adam Macintosh divorced his deranged wife Nicky Taylor, taking custody of their son Ethan; later he married her sister Chloe, a celebrated magazine editor and champion of women’s rights. The two sisters have long been estranged; Ethan regards Chloe as his mother. Adam left his job as a prosecutor to work for a high-priced law firm which, together with Chloe’s salary, means they can afford the finer things in life. All we know about Nicky is her poor choice in abusive boyfriends and her descent into alcoholism—Chloe’s POV drives the story.

One night, the shocking murder of Adam changes everything. Perhaps he’d not been the doting husband; perhaps Chloe has a selective memory about her perfect life; perhaps Ethan is dealing drugs. The fact that Chloe is having a secret affair with another lawyer adds a complication. Also, she had been getting trolled on social media with violent language, which she ignored. When she realizes that Adam had lied about where he spent the last two days of his life, the cops ignore that. Instead, Ethan is indicted for the murder of his father and the two sisters have to come to terms with each other. Defence lawyer Olivia has a row to hoe. Alafair Burke never fails, with unforeseen twists in both courtroom and psychological drama.

Bits and Pieces:

▪ Nicky would never intentionally harm anyone, but she had a way of damaging everyone who entered her orbit.

▪ “You’re getting these kinds of threats, and he didn’t set the alarm before going to sleep?”

▪ I didn’t like the feeling of a detective being curious about us right now.

▪ I closed my eyes and did the same thing silently, asking a God I hadn’t spoken to for more than twenty years to send Ethan home today.

▪ It was almost as if he was resigned to his current life in the detention center, which we disrupted with reminders of the world he had lost.

▪ (Olivia) “I can’t protect him from things he doesn’t tell me about.”

▪ (Nicky) “I read everything. One of the upsides of insomnia and not being a pharmaceutical garbage can anymore.”

▪ “The same dysfunction. You rebelled. I became a control freak.”

▪ (Nicky) “When girls feel lost, they hurt themselves. Boys hurt others.”

Peter Robinson. Careless Love. 2018. Electronic edition (ebook), download from Toronto Public Library. Kindle edition published by McClelland & Stewart, 2018.

Good old Banksy – the literary one. The story is permeated more than ever with his music choices (to the point of some reader distraction), in an attempt to stave off his lonely domestic life. A bit of sad reviewing there, of his past loves. This time around Banks puzzles over a young girl’s unmarked dead body, propped in a car at the side of a country road. He and detective Winsome learn that Adrienne was a student at the local college; toxicology shows she had a deadly mix of pills. Meanwhile, fellow cops Annie and Gerry are introduced to wealthy citizen Laurence Hadfield, lying with a broken neck at the foot of a steep Yorkshire cliff. The police have a duty to investigate the circumstances in both cases. Hadfield’s son Ronald sees his death merely as an administrative nuisance; daughter Poppy is so addled with alcohol and drugs, it’s hard to tell if she feels anything.

A second female student is found murdered in a remote bothy—this dead girl Sarah provides a slim connection to Adrienne. It wasn’t hard to see one theory coming from a mile off, but piecing together the events that all took place on the same evening seems impossible. Few links come from their hard work. Policewoman Annie’s dad Ray lives nearby, in a solid relationship with Zelda, a former victim of sex trafficking; she now works with a group to help identify the criminals. By chance, Zelda came across a recent photo of Banks’ and Annie’s dangerous nemesis: Phil Keane (but this thread – disappointingly – remained unpulled, clear fodder for the next book). Misogyny writ large dominates on different levels.

The abrupt end was a shock. Not appreciated at all. I actually had to double-check that pages hadn’t been misplaced somehow. Continued, I hope, in Many Rivers to Cross. More than ever, Banks’ aura of brooding speaks of loneliness.

Bits and Pieces:

▪ “In neither case do we have any evidence of injuries inflicted by another person, which means that both deaths could be accidental, or the result of suicide.”

▪ “It’s quite a shock when you realise how young your parents were at certain key months of your life. Somehow, they always seemed so much older than you.”

▪ About the only thing nobody ever got right in England was the bloody weather. Especially in Yorkshire. (319)

Banks:

▪ Time was running out for such things, he realised, and there was nothing more pathetic than an old man in a desperate search for young love.

▪ (to Ray) “I’m just trying to set you right about the true nature of the kind of people who employ her. Don’t be so trusting about their motives. Or their methods.”

▪ Banks sensed Annie bristle beside him. She hated it when women flirted with him. (468)

▪ This had always been his worst time of the night, when all his faculties were at their lowest ebb and the silky tendrils of depression started to slink in and twist around his thoughts and memories, wrapping them in darkness. (515)

What some say about others:

▪ (about Ray and Zelda) “I don’t know why, but there’s a powerful chemistry about them ...”

▪ “People like Hadfield are constantly searching for ways to unload their money that make them look good in the public eye.”

▪ (Annie) “I’m not sure Poppy could organise a piss-up in a brewery.”

▪ (son Ronald) “I could never do anything right in his eyes, never be as good as him. And he doted on my fucked-up junkie slut of a sister.” (342)

▪ (about Sarah) “Tramp like that, you can hardly expect her to stick with just one man.” (505)

Chloe Benjamin. The Immortalists. USA: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2018.

A real paper book in hand, chosen more or less at random on the eve of lockdown, expecting some intrigue (“If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?”). No, not as expected. Four siblings in the Gold family are very close as children; none of them forget a clandestine childhood visit to a strange fortune-teller who predicts their individual death dates. And not all of them tell each other. Varya, the eldest, is introverted and anxious, eventually becoming a scientist; Daniel always had his sights set on becoming a doctor. Klara is obsessed with magic, illusion, and its transformative power; Simon is only sixteen when he runs away to San Francisco with Klara to explore his sexuality, believing he will die young. Their parents Gertie and Saul play as minor figures. Basically, we have four separate stories—or shall we say four behavioural studies?―wherein the sibling closeness almost vanishes, where only sitting shiva brings them together.

Simon and Klara cling to each other as she ekes a living from magic tricks at nightclubs and picking pockets, while Simon becomes a dancer. His path is the easiest to understand: in the early 80s, gay men are just becoming aware of HIV. Predictably, he dies on the date given by the fortune-teller, at the age of twenty. Klara had known the date and becomes haunted by him. But a difficult, sensational new act raises demand for her own performances; she accepts a partner and manager, Raj, to become so professional that they establish themselves in Las Vegas. Klara produces the only grandchild, Ruby, but her mind grows increasingly fragile. Raj incorporates a teenage Ruby into the act.

The older two follow more conformist paths after university. Yet Daniel is troubled by the family deaths and lets anger at himself and others lead him to his own forecasted death. Varya is haunted by all of them, a reclusive, obsessive-compulsive biologist in anti-aging lab research. She also has her freak-out moment. One can easily say the deaths are self-fulfilling prophecies, but of course there’s much more to each character’s story. A bit too much when one of them particularly stirred my empathy. A lot of skipping back and forth time-wise sometimes vexes an already complicated tale. A book that could be fascinating for devotees of psychological drama. Memo to self ... an on off writer.

Bits and Pieces:

▪ Distant though he was, Saul had allowed each Gold to assume their separate roles: he the breadwinner, Gertie the general, Varya the obedient eldest, Simon the unburdened youngest. If their father’s body—his cholesterol lower than Gertie’s, his heart nothing if not steady—had simply stopped, what else could go wrong? Which other laws might warp? (23)

▪ Astonishing, that they could diverge so dramatically in their temperaments, their fatal flaws—like strangers caught for seconds in the same elevator. (320)

▪ “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” (203)

Simon:

▪ Simon doesn’t think he believes in God, but then again, he’s never thought God believes in him. According to the Book of Leviticus, he’s an abomination. What kind of God would create a person of which He so disapproved? Simon can only think of two explanations: either there’s no God at all, or Simon was a mistake, a fuck-up. He’s never been sure which option scares him more. (71)

▪ Maybe the prophecy did plant inside him like a germ. Maybe it incited him to be rash—to live dangerously. (223)

Klara:

▪ The very best magic tricks, the kind Klara wants to perform, do not subtract from reality. They add. (112)

▪ What is growing a baby if not making a flower appear from thin air, turning one scarf into two? (131)

▪ Perhaps the point is not to resist death. Perhaps the point is that there’s no such thing. If Simon and Saul are contacting Klara, then consciousness survives the death of the body. If consciousness survives the death of the body, then everything she’s been told about death isn’t true. And if everything she’s been told about death isn’t true, maybe death is not death at all. (166-7)

Daniel:

▪ “I work for a military entrance processing station. I make sure that soldiers are healthy enough to go to war.” (220)

▪ He spent decades punishing himself for something that had never been his fault. As Daniel’s compassion for himself swells, his anger toward the fortune teller hardens. (228)

▪ Our language is our strength, he’d written. Beneath that was a second phrase, one Daniel had traced over so many times that it seemed to rise, three-dimensionally, from the page: Thoughts have wings. (291)

Varya:

▪ She had lost parts of herself as she lost her siblings. (294)

▪ She knows her faith—that rituals have power, that thoughts can change outcomes or ward off misfortune―is a magic trick: fiction, perhaps, but necessary for survival. (295)

▪ “I was afraid,” she says. “Of all the things that can go wrong when people are attached to each other.” (316)

Ruby: “I mean, Jesus,” she says, “I want to go to college, I want to be a real person. I want to do something that matters.”(233)

San Francisco ca.1980:

“I’m not going to die, Simon.” 

“How the hell do you know that?” 

“Because I do.” Klara opens her bag, puts the folder inside, and zips it shut. “I refuse to.” 

“Right,” says Simon. “You and every other person who’s ever lived.” 

Klara doesn’t respond. Simon knows this is how she gets when she has an idea. Like a dog with a bone, Gertie used to say, but that isn’t quite true; it’s more that Klara becomes impermeable, unreachable. She exists somewhere else. 

“Hey.” Simon flicks her arm. “What’ll you call it? Your act?” 

Klara smiles in her feline way: the sharp little canines, a shake of glitter in her eyes. 

“The Immortalist,” she says. (82)