[838] The Mystery of the Blue Train – Agatha Christie

“A mirror shows the truth, but everyone stands in a different place for looking into the mirror.” (Ch.32, 291)

On the luxurious Blue Train Ruth Kettering, daughter of American billionaire Rufus Van Aldin, travels to Nice on her annual winter getaway with some precious rubies in her possession. Without her father’s knowing, she has planned a secret rendezvous with an old flame, of whom her father despises, in the French Riviera.

In another compartment sits Katherine Grey, who has come to wealth after she inherits a fortune from the old lady she has taken care the past ten years. Also on board is Dereek Kettering, who has no idea that his wife is on the train, and he is with his mistress, the actress Mirelle. The next morning, no sooner has Grey got off the train than she is called as a witness to Ruth Kettering’s murder. She has struck a brief conversation with Ruth Kettering who confided in her her troubles. What is more, Katherine Grey recognizes Dereek as the man she saw going into Ruth’s compartment on the night of her murder.

The story, though lesser known, is well-crafted, and the characterization nuanced. At stake is the precious jewelry that would benefit Dereek, but Hercule Poirot from instinct dismisses the obvious evidence that implicates the husband. There are things that do not add up: a lighter with the engraved ‘K’, the victim’s maid left the train in Paris and didn’t accompany her mistress, and the fact that Ruth’s face was disfigured. It’s the layering of issues and their underlying problems that are most impressive about the plot. Christie has deftly led reader astray from the original assessments, and there is more to the story than what appears.

Mystery aside this book is about women who are coming to terms of their own. Ruth Kettering is locked in an unhappy marriage; Katherine Grey is a woman who keeps her own counsel. They meet on the train just hours before Ruth was murdered. This is not a fast-paced mystery, but Christie has a way of bringing together characters, who at first seem so far apart from one another in distance and temperament.

317 pp. Black Dog & Leventhal. Hardback. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[836] The Girl on the Train – Paula Hawkins

“Hallowness: that I understand. I’m starting to believe that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it. That’s what I’ve taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps.”

The Girl on the Train is a fairly well-crafted thriller that revolves around the daily delusion of one woman, Rachel, who has been divorced and dismissed from fer job. She is the girl on the train who takes her mind off her beleaguered life by imagining the lives of others. Specifically, the lives of “Jess and Jason” who live at the house near the railway signal where her train stops every morning. To her they seem to live up to the exemplary marriage she had always dreamed of—until one morning on which Rachel sees something the completely shatters that image.

The book is full of secrets—everyone has them. The narrative makes up of those from three women, who are, between an alcoholic, a liar, and a cheat, all unreliable. They are also entangled in relationships that are gradually revealed. These little mysteries, personal secrets that exist outside of what we see on the surface propel the plot, which delves into the timeless question of how much can you really know a person. As Rachel is pulled into the lives of these people for whom she invents life details, she is restless to find out about their secrets. She probes and tries to recall exactly what happened on the fateful night the victim disappeared. She is prone to blackout and drunk dialling. The memory loss prompt means a blurry repetition of images redolent throughout the pages—blood, an underpass, a blue dress, and a man with red hair, all jumble in her mind.

I give credits to Hawkins for the bold move to create a flawed female lead. Her alcoholic lifestyle discredits her testimony. She wobbles in misery and the aftermath of a failed marriage, but she is quite magnetic in her occasional spite. She is more sympathetic than the missing Meagan, and Anna, the wife of her ex-husband. Hawkins juggles perspectives intentionally full of blind spots with great skill, building up a suspense along with empathy for an unusual central character that doesn’t immediately grab with the reader.

336 pp. Riverhead Books. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[835] My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry – Fredrik Backman

“They’re ferocious and bloodthirsty, and if you’re bitten by one you don’t just die; a far more serious and terrible fate lies in store: you lose your imagination . . . you wither away year by year until your body is just a shell.” (Ch.5, 46)

Elsa is an 8-year-old smartypant who gets bullied in school for her precociousness. Her only friend, and best friend, is her eclectic grandmother. Elsa’s precociousness along with her granny’s disregard for societal rules mark them as trouble to most people they encounter and make Elsa a pariah at school. To escape from reality, Elsa journeys to a fairy realm created by her granny, the Land-pf-Almost_Awake, with six kingdoms, each with its strength, purpose, and interlocking mythologies. When granny dies, she leaves Elsa a treasure hunt—she gets tapped to deliver a series of letters of various people in her building, and she is compelled to find out the secrets behind why there is a message of apology to all of them.

The fairy tales can often get the better of the main story. They can somewhat overwrought and tedious but Elsa’s adventures press on the pages. There is quite a system granny has invented for the relationships between her imaginary kingdoms. As Elsa learns about the troublesome day on which she was born, she is also enlightened to the philanthropic work her granny did as a surgeon and why her work had alienated her mother. It doesn’t surprise that the hunt reveals that each of the misfits in the building has a connection to her granny, and they are all hurt, damaged souls who have a story reflected in granny’s fairyland. It’s quite a complex tale and is intricately woven. Sometimes it gets really tedious, but it captures beautifully the honestly of children and obtuseness of adults.

(Note: I picked this up because of the universally acclaimed The Man Named Ove; but I am glad I have read this first and save Ove for later because the reviews are all in favor of Ove.)

372 pp. Simon & Schuster. Trade Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[834] The King of Torts – John Grisham

“Were these people so blinded by the money that they honestly believed themselves to be defenders of the poor and the sick?” (Ch.15, 164)

As the title implies, the book is about a down-and-out public defender turned mass tort who brings lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies for their defective drugs and rakes in millions of dollars. From a mysterious source he also benefits from inside trading of the stocks. Soon Clay Carter takes on other cases and is noticed across the country as he amasses case after case against these companies, until he jumps on one bandwagon too many, compelled by greed, and starts making mistakes.

The book is off to a more gripping start as Carter learns about the conspiracy behind a drug with fatal side effect. Then it trickles to a tedious pace with long repetitions. It goes on about the indecent practices of mass torts, their shameless advertising and solicitation, ripping off their clients of their rightful settlements by charging huge fees. It’s a predictable book with little thrill element. Clay’s character is flat—it’s not like a good person was being corrupted by money, rather it feels like the author doesn’t know who the character is. The errors in judgment concerning the waste of money and lack of caution are more than unbelievable. I only recommend it if you need a no-brainer book that carries you over a long airport layover.

470 pp. Dell Books. Pocket Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[832] Behind Closed Doors – B.A. Paris

“Since joining our circle of friends a month ago, I’m sure she’s been told over and over again that Grace Angel, wife of brilliant lawyer Jack Angel, is a perfect example of a woman who has it all—the perfect house, the perfect husband, the perfect life.” (8)

Or does she? The story grips you from the very beginning. Husband and wife of this perfect marriage are hosting a gourmet dinner for two other couples, who have become their new firm friends when the Angels moved into town. But it’s easy to spot tension that percolates the conversation around the table. Grace is compelled to say the right words and acts in accord to her husband’s dictate. She is acting under his silent duress.

The story alternates between the present and the past, and is told from Grace’s point of view. The past is only a few weeks before they get married after a whirlwind of romance. Angel believes she’s the luckiest woman to have married Jack, a brilliant lawyer who genuinely seems to care for her 17-year-old sister, Millie, who has Down’s syndrome. The past-intertwining-present narrative style drives the story with such mounting tension and relentless pace, with the end of each chapter being a cliffhanger. The plot is basic but strewn with decoys and twists. It’s a mental cat-and-mouse chase, a constant game of one-upping. The domestic psychological thriller reminds us that sometimes the worst terror comes not from strangers but those closest to us.

351 pp. St. Martin Press. Advanced Reader’s Copy. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[831] The Days of Abandonment – Elena Ferrante

“What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive in him.” (Ch.31, 140)

The Days of Abandonment (Il Divorcio) is the raw, ferocious depiction of one woman, Olga, and her descent into disarray after her husband of fifteen years suddenly announces that he is leaving her because he is confused and unhappy. He manipulates Olga to call the shot of their separation. After he leaves, Olga has to care for the two children in addition to housework. She would sit in her increasingly disorderly home, writing letters to Mario and trying to identify the moment when her marriage ceased to be the mature partnership that she’d always thought it to be.

… and I don’t know what physiognomy he had attributed to me, what montage of me had made him fall in love, what, on the other hand, had turned out to be repugnant to him, making him fall out of love. (Ch.26, 124)

What makes the book so powerful is the voice, first-person, caught in space between telling a story and explaining, justifying to herself what had happened to her marriage. Reader gets inside Olga’s head, witnesses her erratic thoughts, her dangerous motives, her hallucinations, her rage, her pain and her desperation. This is when the book sometimes get too difficult and muddy. She plunges into this vertigo where she cannot help lash at society and turn cynical and sarcastic, and withdraw her trust in people. She’s in a purgatory of rage and bereavement.

Without herself knowing, she has taken absence of her sense and lapsed into a momentary loss of sanity. But it’s almost as if this trip to hell and back is necessary and conducive to the healing. She’s making decisions that have sure consequences. She’s in self-scrutiny but also self-denial. Between reason, insanity and survival, she continues to live. It reads like a monologue of someone thrives to fight, who might have taken absence of sense but never an absence of morality.

187 pp. Europa Editions. Trade Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[828] The Little Paris Bookshop – Nina George

“Memories are like wolves. You can’t lock them away and hope they leave you leave.” (Ch.1, 5)

The Little Paris Bookshop has a very promising start: a bookshop on a barge called the Literary Apothecary on the bank of Seine in Paris, a bookseller who not only loves books but has a nearly mystical ability to assess the deepest feelings and wounds of his customers, and cats that nudge behind bookshelves and keep his company.

For twenty years Jean Perdu is still heartbroken over his lost love, and the room Manon used to live in has been barred by a giant bookcase. But when Perdu reads the letter from her, sealed and stowed away for twenty-one years, everything changes for him. He decides to set sail for the town in southern France where Manon was from, along with a best-selling author who is stuck in a writer’s block. Together they embark on a trip to small quaint towns where they use books as currency to exchange for food and services.

The journey is an emotional one poised on self-reflection. Perdu experiences a self-awakening that frees himself from the compulsion to only make the right moves. There’s a lot of soul searching and conversation in the head, as he wrestles the thoughts that all these years he has endured loneliness because he did not want to trust love again.

All of us preserve time. We preserve the old versions of the people who have left us. And under our skin, under the layers of wrinkles and experience and laughter, we, too, are old versions of ourselves. (Ch.19, 137)

But ironically, as much as he prescribes books to his wounded customers, he is the one who is sorely in need of nourishment and healing; and he is not cured by books, but by friendship, time, and love. Hurt feelings have their time distance and they have to run the course.

I appreciate the concept behind this novel, which really should be a short story. Before halfway it has become flat and has exhausted the point it’s making. The book barge Nd the book trade peter out early, and I do not expect the book to be a romance in the most literal sense.

408 pp. Broadway Books. Trade Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[827] The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton

“Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person’s point of view.”

The Luminaries is an entangled, convoluted story, at least told in a convoluted manner, that is set in the 19th century, during the last days of the New Zealand gold rush. It’s an action-adventure, sprawling detective story, well-plotted but owing to the stylistic choice Catton so scrupulously pursues, too long due to the reiteration of events. The style is that each successive part is half the length of its predecessor, such that before long the chapter introductions are longer than the text they preface. And Catton’s commitment to delineating a full year’s astrological changes requires looping back to events of 1865-1866 repetitiously for the last quarter of the book.

A string of coincidences is not a coincidence.

The novel attempts to unravel the mystery of a day when a chain of events unfold in the town of Hokitika. A very wealthy man—owner of a gold mine, disappeared. A prostitute tried to end her life. An enormous fortune was found in the home of a hapless drunk, who was overdosed on laudanum. His identity and mining tight had been stolen. These seemingly unrelated events turn out to be part of a bigger plan of an ex-con man. The arrival of a man who is running for councilman kicks off this string of strange coincidences. This ex-con man who has cheated Alastair Lauderback out of his ship then lost the shipping crate by which he had forced the politician’s hand. Inside this crate was a trunk containing gold, a fortune that had been sewn into the lining of five dresses. The seamstress was a crafty woman named Lydia Wells, a brothel owner who was, at that time, posing as the ex-con’s wife, and helping him to steal her ex-husband’s fortune. When the prostitute learned, some weeks after her arrival in Hokitika, that a trunk containing women’s dresses had been salvaged from a wreck, she purchased all five without noticing the added weight since she is an opium user and it as sober.

So a multiple storylines cram the 800 pages, winding up a skein of a mystery that’s rich with sibling secrets, sex, opium and drugs, a doomed love affair, murder, extortion, impersonation, fraud, forgery, and double dealing. It opens like a play, with Walter Moody stumbling upon a clandestine meeting of twelve prominent men in a hotel meeting hall. It’s highly wrought, artificial piece of tale-telling accorded to the astrological framing device. The opacity of this angle results in reiteration of events over and over again. In this respect, the novel appears too clever for its own good. That said, Catton’s use of contemporary slang, circumlocutions, and lexicons befitting the different characters are all spot-on.

830 pp. Little Brown Books. Hardback. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[821] Ubik – Philip K. Dick

“Here’s what happened. We got lured to Luna. We let Pat Conley come with us, a woman we didn’t know, a talent we didn’t understand—which possibly even Hollis didn’t understand. An ability somehow connected with time reversion; not strictly speaking, the ability to travel through time . . . what she does . . . is start a counter-process that uncovers the prior stages inherent in configurations of matter.” (Ch.14, 191)

Set in the Northern American Confederation in time when interstellar commute is common, the book is largely told from the perspective of Joe Chip, who works for an agency of “anti-psis” that stops telepaths invading other people’s privacy. Society is such that every individual’s thought process can be monitored and that any thought can materialize in the mind. This prudence organization is run by a man named Glen Runciter with the assistance of his wife, who has died physically but is preserved in a state of “half life” in cryonic condition at a specialized moratorium.

Runciter’s agency dedicates to fighting a rival organization of telepaths, headed by Ray Hollis, that uses its psychic power to undertake corporate espionage and cause trouble. He lays a rat-trap for Runciter and Joe Chip in Luna where Runciter is killed by a self-destruct humanoid bomb. Those who survive the blast, upon returning to Earth, experience a curious deterioration process. But they realize they, and not Runciter himself, are the ones who are slowly perishing, by turning incredibly cold and drying up.

But this is where the mystery of time-slippage thickens. There seems to be an underlying, vicious force that aims for their death. The story takes a rather mind-boggling turn to a state of confusion that suggests it was actually Chip, not Runciter, who almost died in the explosion on the moon. But it’s this confusion, or deception, in a sense, that makes Ubik shine. Like reality, what we see as reality, anyway, does not make much coherent sense. The unease, the difficulty, the contradictions, the multiplicating realities, are partly the point. It’s about realizations that are not what they seem.

I find the plot less interesting than the characters, the theme, and the virtuosity of the writing. Dick’s explications of his fractual reality look easy to accomplish, but they really aren’t. It questions whether this thing we call reality might be just a collective hallucination.

224 pp. Orion Books. Trade Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[820] Belchamber – Howard Sturgis

“He had an almost painful intuition of her sacrifices, her hopes, her frustrate ambitions for him, and of the disappointments he must inevitably be to her; he probably read into her not very complex emotions fine shades of sensibility from his own consciousness . . . It was this habit of deference to her lightest wish they sent him off against his wish . . . ” (V, 55)

Set in 1890s England, Belchamber is a novel of aristocratic life told in the perspective of a misfit. Its originality lies in how the protagonist, a high-minded, high-born weakling, slightly effeminate heir to a marquisate, is at odds with what the high society expects of a gentleman. Born Charles Edwin William Augustus Chambers, the Marquis and Earl of Belchamber, he is commonly known as Sainty. He has no taste for games, girls, or money; he dislikes sports and hunting but adores gardening and interior decoration. Another eccentricity that shows his unfitness for his social status is his exaggerated propensity for work. He has a genuine aptitude for scholarship and loves erudition for its own sake. In short, he is a loner content in his own world.

And he launched out a tirade, . . . on the barbarism of the English upper classes, their want of education and refinement, their inability to appreciate intellectual pleasures, their low standard of morality, and, above all, their entire self-satisfaction and conviction of their own perfect rightness. (VII, 87)

The great moment of Sainty comes early on, when he becomes friends with his tutor Gerald Newsby in Cambridge. Then his life is shaped, or shattered to pieces, by two powerful women if very strong will. His mother, Lady Charmington, with her severe morals and puritanical obduracy, exercises a tight reign over him. Lady Eccleston, a tireless schemer who constructs the marriage plot to ensnare him. Cissy herself, though also in a way a victim of her mother’s deceit, is a fortune-hunting girl who makes the most of her situation. She despises Sainty but spends his money with insolent abandon. She’s a heartless monster, an adulteress, who epitomizes the very vices of high society that Saint renounces. All the sympathy one might feel for her would quickly desiccate as the novel nears the end.

The book portrays a series of betrayals against Sainty and his spinelessness to fight back, for the sake of preserving appearance and avoiding scandal. He is crushed by the race for luxury, since he himself is rich enough to absorb his losses and quite indifferent to his possessions. There’s a ponderous, contemplative quality to the writing, often supplying psychological stings after a plot narrative. Despite being a misfit, Sainty remains an aristocrat; he is bored and repulsed by his class yet never ceases to belong to it. It’s a story about individualism thwarted and innocence deceived, and, after all, virtue is not its own reward.

334 pp. New York Review Books. Trade Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]