Tom

I haven’t posted recently about the books I’ve been reading but I’m going to catch up, starting now!

I don’t usually read mysteries, but I like Lawrence Osborne. His novels tend to be leisurely, slow-burn mysteries that could be mistaken for impeccably observed travel memoirs, except for the fact that usually there’s a dead body that needs hiding, finding or explaining. He reminds me a bit of Graham Greene; his stories are set in exotic locales all across the globe – Bangkok, Morocco, Mexico, Cambodia and this one which takes place in Hong Kong at an indeterminate time, but probably a few years ago.

To set the scene, students, among others, are protesting, and the pro-democracy demonstrations are being quashed with escalating violence by Chinese authorities and pro-Beijing street gangs. Everyone is on edge: “There was a rippling electricity in the air waves; the herd spooked by the approach of wolves who have not yet been seen but whose tremendous and alien scent is on the wind.” Osborne colorfully evokes the lure of the foreign and sets the scene for his narrator, Adrian Gyle, an expatriate reporter who has been eking out a lazy living in Hong Kong for decades, a down-at-the-heels character who would fit right into a Graham Greene novel.

He’s been in Hong Kong since just after the 1997 handover, and now his best days and best work are behind him. He spends his time dawdling with Jimmy Tang, his close friend from his years at Cambridge, and Jimmy’s wife, Melissa — and then, critically, with the man’s much younger mistress, the 23-year-old Rebecca To. Opposites in temperament and circumstances, Adrian and Jimmy have maintained a close friendship since a shared enthusiasm for Chinese poetry brought them together as undergraduates.

Jimmy has two yachts with crews, and cars with drivers at the ready, and his wardrobe and liquor cabinet are awash in brand names that the superrich take for granted. Occasionally, Adrian will betray his resentment toward Jimmy with a revealing aside about how shallow his friend really is: “When talking about Maoism, for example, he would just grimace and say, ‘Yes, yes, I understand, but the clothes, comrade, the clothes.’”

Adrian is impressed with Rebecca, a woman who, like Jimmy, comes from money. She’s smart, resourceful and part of the student rebellion, occasionally even smelling like tear gas — which complicates her affair with Jimmy because the Tang family has standing with the Communist Party. “We can’t have Jimmy going all pro-democracy on us,” Jimmy’s wife says when she is probing Adrian about Jimmy’s latest dalliance.

When Jimmy and Rebecca are spotted by a tabloid photographer, their affair becomes public and endangers Jimmy’s marriage and reputation. But Rebecca’s fate seems to be far worse; soon after, she vanishes and the body of a woman whose name is not released is brought to the morgue. The deeper Adrian digs, the more he suspects his college chum. At one point, he talks to Rebecca’s father, who has known the Tang family for decades and recalls that Jimmy “was always careless with others.”

What if your oldest friend might be a killer, but you can’t prove it? What if he isn’t a killer, but simply uses his connections and clout to make a problem like a young lover go away? Or what if Jimmy isn’t involved at all, but Adrian has simply grown tired of the unequal nature of their friendship and sees a chance to use his own power as a journalist (albeit one whose career is teetering toward irrelevance) to bring his pal down a peg?

But On Java Road most excels as superbly atmospheric reportage of a place and time. Hong Kong, within its “amphitheater of subtropical hills”, is captured with confident sweep and in vivid detail: the goldfish market with its walls of glimmering fish in plastic bags of water, the black bunting fluttering outside the funeral parlors of Java Road, the ferries crisscrossing the harbor, whose waters at night reflect the neon light show blazoned from its waterfront towers. Diversity shimmers — and simmers. From the balconies of mansions ensconced in jungle vegetation on its Mid-Levels, shipping billionaires and other oligarchs expediently kowtowing to Beijing look down, drink in hand, at the chaotic avenues below where black-clad students in scuba masks use woks to smother tear gas canisters hurled by police squads.

It’s a wonderful book, maybe more about the human condition and the nature of friendships than about the murder of a young woman, but you can have both and immerse yourself in the marvels of Hong Kong.

Set mostly in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling, from acclaimed author Russell Banks, is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground.

“The Darling” begins on Hannah’s farm in the Adirondacks; she has decided to return, after a decade’s absence, to Liberia. We learn that her husband is dead and her children are missing; we are promised that the details will come later. Hannah loops back to her past, her years as a fugitive Weatherman, her family history. Her parents raised her to believe that her principles are of weight in the world; even when she doesn’t communicate with them directly for years, they stand by her. Tired of living underground, she forges a passport and accompanies a fellow fugitive to Africa, settling in Liberia and working in a lab that has chimpanzees.

She marries Woodrow Sundiata, a minister in the corrupt government of William Tolbert, bears him three children and inhabits a bubble of privilege as the white wife of a high government official, with servants and enough leisure to devote to animal rescue. Then, during a brutal revolution, Woodrow is “chopped down and killed” in front of his wife and children, who vanish to become crazed killers called “Worse Than Death,”+ “Fly” and “Demonology.” Her return completed, she leaves Monrovia on 9/11, and goes to an America as unrecognizably transformed as her sons.

In America Hannah decides to visit her parents for the first time in 15 years. After surprising her mother she learns that her father suffered a cerebral hemorrhage a few weeks before her return. Though her mother is optimistic about his recovery Hannah quickly realizes that he is completely brain-dead. She is able to visit her father once in the hospital before he dies. Shaken by the death of her father, Hannah steals her mothers car and visits Charles Taylor whom she helps escape from American jail and return to Liberia where he leads a revolution and eventually comes to power.

Hannah spends the rest of her time in Liberia fruitlessly searching for her sons despite the urging of Sam Clement, the American ambassador, to leave for America. He at last provides a video tape showing that her children are now child soldiers working for Prince Johnson who have murdered Samuel Doe. He also reveals that the Americans were behind Charles Taylor’s escape from prison and rise to power and that they have known Hannah’s true identity and movements for decades. Hannah, dispirited that all along she was working on behalf of the interests of the CIA finally leaves Liberia.

I spent some time in Liberia and Banks’ writing is evocative of the sights and sounds of the country. The book will give you a good sense of the country and its violent past.

“Everyone knows that this is a dangerous business, but between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise…”

A Dangerous Business is an entertaining, light murder mystery set in Monterey, California, in 1851 during the Gold Rush. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Eliza and Jean — one a young widow relieved to be rid of her abusive older husband, the other an adventurous, shape-shifting cross-dresser with a dark secret in her past — are determined to deploy logic and observation to figure out who killed their missing colleagues.

Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have: financial security. But when the dead bodies of young women start appearing outside of town, a darkness descends that she can’t resist confronting. Side by side with her friend Jean, and inspired by her reading, especially by Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Dupin, Eliza pieces together an array of clues to try to catch the killer, all the while juggling clients who begin to seem more and more suspicious.

As the bodies and clues pile up, Eliza becomes suspicious of all of her clients — the drunks, the lonely lechers, the sex-starved sailors, the talkative lawyer with a dagger in his jacket pocket, “the evangelical who wept and puked and passed out.” She even starts to doubt the friendly young rancher who likes to take her out for breakfast, as if they were “a respectable couple.”

Eliza, initially ignorant of so much, is uneducated but by no means stupid. She picks up knowledge everywhere: from her clients fresh off ships from around the world, from books they give her, like David Copperfield and A Scarlet Letter, and from overheard conversations about America’s divide over slavery and the growing probability of civil war.

Eliza’s determination to see the larger picture opens up the world to her. She is a young woman trying to define herself in a young country doing the same. Smiley wryly notes that her character comes to realize that “life had turned out to be more complex than even she, in her business, had expected.”