50. A Chill Rain in January by L.R. Wright

50 books achieved. I guess it's a good sign that I don't make a big deal out of my 50th book anymore.  Like a succesful athlete, not too high, not too low.  Just keep grinding.  Still, satisfying.

I picked this one up at the family home which may not be so much longer as we were there to move our mother to assisted living. I "discovered" L.R. Wright on my own only a few years ago, but now realize that my parents must have been reading her books at the time they came out as we have a few of her paperbacks floating around in the study.

A Chill Rain in January is the fourth or fifth book in the series, and I think it may have been a bit more fulfilling had I been reading them in order.  There are two major plotlines in the mystery that collide.  The first and the main character is Zoe Strachan, a beautiful sociopath who lives on her own outside of Sechelt with a perfectly controlled life until her spendthrift older brother comes to blackmail her for money.  He has her "scribblers", notebooks where she reveals her true inhuman self and evidently admits to some actual crimes.  At the same time, Ramona Orlitzki, an old woman loved by the community escapes from the hospital where she has recently been committed because of her oncoming dementia.

It's a nice premise and the characters are well-conceived.  Unfortunately, I found the actual storyline frustrating.  The suspense is extended multiple times due to incompetence among multiple characters, incompetence that is never called out and so it is left unresolved.  The officer hunting for Ramona doesn't look in her closet when he goes to her old home.  This is never really mentioned as an error.  The coroner finds strange injuries on the murder victim and Sergeant Elberg, who is the main character of the entire series, totally brushes them off. Worse, when he finally cottons on that there is something suspicious going on, the coroner then seems to try to contradict that.  It's inconsistent and frustrating. And it keeps going right up to the climactic conclusion where the mailman is given the crucial evidence and just dumps it off at the police station instead of taking it right to the top.  Finally, when they do figure it out, they wait until the next day which allows for a major out for everybody (being vague here for spoiler alerts).  All this incompetence leads to two unnecessary deaths and should lead to a major scandal and one would hope an investigation into the RCMP in Sechelt (of course, all the Mounties would be exonerated since we all know how that goes in Canada but there should have at least been some official murmurings).

The physical locations, the weather and the trees and water were all well-written and did remind me of my own childhood and that is why I read these.  What was missing, though, from this one, is the human culture of coastal B.C.  This could have taken place almost anywhere.  I'm hoping this was an exception from the rule for this series. 

 

49. A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

My sister forced me to read this.  She is a bit like a male nerd in that way but only sporadically and she does have good taste (she got me to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas years back) so I acquiesced.  I had read A House for Mr. Biswas in the pre-50 Books days and loved it, so felt it wasn't going to be a challenge to read this one, despite it being a bit high-falutin compared to my usual reading choices.  It's actually a fairly "intellectual" book.  Though very well-written, it's much slower to get through than Mr. Biswas.  There is a lot of inner reflection, both personal and political and ideas that take some parsing and re-reading.  So it took me a while.  On top of it, I am fully back into the Tabletop RPG community (Discord seems to have become the replacement for the old forums) and had a major life task (moving our mother into assisted living) both of which contributed to inconsistent reading.  I finally banged out the last third in a night of jetlag insomnia.

It's the story of Salim, an Indian African (African Indian?) who was born and raised in the coast of Africa but is given a small goods store up the river.  Here he half-heartedly tries to start a new life away from his family compound and culture amidst the political and social turmoil of post-independence central Africa.  Everybody knows the book takes place in the Congo and the Big Man is Mobuto but they are never specifically mentioned by name in the book.

I won't go into any depth because there is a lot to write and discuss that has been done already by smarter and more diligent people.  I would like to focus on one element relevant to today's collapse into authoritarianism, which is the protagonist's strange passivity and listlessness in the face of the changes around him and his community.  We know that really bad shit is coming down and he sort of does as well.  So it's a bit dissonant as a reader to see Salim basically just putting one foot in front of the other.  What finally knocks him out of his malaise is a woman, who gives him an image of another world (basically cool Europe) but even this doesn't really create much initiative in him.  What Naipaul succeeds in here is demonstrating how difficult it is for people who come up in such an old and solid reality to conceive of alternatives to that reality (positive or negative) let alone acting on such alternatives, even when it may be a question of survival.

Salim's family has been in Africa for generations and though not of Africa, they are as thoroughly fundamental to the social fabric as the indigenous Africans (and less-indigenous Arabs).  When the institutions around them begin to collapse with the end of colonialism, they can only shrink into themselves.  There is also an element of privilege, where their role as "foreigners" with greater wealth and status as well as some contacts outside of Africa delays the impact of the real horrors to them compared to the Africans (who also have also suffered the horrors of colonialism and are thus in a sense already living after the apocalypse).  

But the horrors are coming, just like they are coming to us right now.  And I see the same sort of stunned stolidness in my American friends.  But what are they to do?  You still have your job that you have to go to, taxes you have to pay and the real bad shit is happening to people you don't know just down the road.  So they cling to the fading promise of already broken institutions like "mid-term elections" and "courts" when they should probably be trying to emigrate to Europe and start a new life before the shit really hits the fan.  That is the major part of the success of the criminals taking over America right now: while they destroy all the elements that made America such a great political experiment, they maintain the ones that allow for day-to-day living and comfort, supported by the shitbags in business and tech.  A Bend in the River really gets into the head of that mentality.

I also have to add that there is a scene of misogyny and gender relations in the book that is so bad and craven and deeply dishonest that it almost risks in undermining the entire enterprise. He beats the woman with which he is having an affair quite brutally and then does some other really sick things.  This portrayed in a book is not in and of itself a sin, as these things happen.  But it feels dishonest here, a forced and artificial narrative device to demonstrate some turning point in the protagonist's thinking which completely renders the woman character a device only and also tries to justify Naipaul's own behaviour (he beat up his girlfriend in real life).  We get this nasty shit in many of the mid-century men's books I read and I abhor it there, but it is usually more "I slapped her and she finally got horny" nonsense.  When literary people do it, they often take it to the next level of grossness.  It's a bad look and undermined much of Naipaul's reputation later and deservedly so.

48. Survival Margin by Charles Eric Maine

I believe this was given to me by a friend who knows I like PA. I thought it was American at first, but quickly realized this is a British author. It's actually not PA, but rather A or whatever the term is called for the sub-genre where the world is actually falling apart.  In this case it is a virus, particularly well-constructed with a bunch of science that sounded more or less legitimate for 1968.  Basically, the virus called AB causes a person to get a fever and then die with in a day or two after which their skin melts off.  This concept seemed disgusting and interesting at the beginning, but then gets totally abandoned and has no impact on any of the issues of dealing with the bodies or people dying at home, etc. I point this out now, because Survival Margin while overall being a a fun look at a world ripped in half by disease, also omits or is sloppy and inconsistent about a lot of fun details. 

The virus has a counterpart called BA that mirrors it but only gives you a slight fever for a day and then you become immune.  But a BA person is also a carrier of AB.  About half the people get AB and die and the other half live, so the premise is that basically half the world is going to die.  The powers that be in England decided to create a bunch of armed and sealed underground bunkers (another sloppy lack of detail because they never really explain how this airborne and waterborne virus wouldn't also get into the bunkers if not already there) to protect their top leaders.  This causes civil unrest that eventually becomes a full-on class divided civil war.  The big picture is fun.

The anchoring narrative is between two main characters: the charming and successful soulless journalist/TV producer Clive Brant and his principled disease scientist wife Pauline.  Right at the beginning, as they reunite after a long absence (she was in Japan fighting the early stages of the disease), he announces that he wants a divorce because he is now seeing the much younger daughter of an American media mogul who is giving him a plum job to run his new new studio.  I saw coming that their narrative was going to be some kind of morale on marriage and relationships throughout the book and it kind of bummed me out.  Felt like the author was working out his own boring relationship issues and getting in the way of the disease apocalypse we came for.  

The disease itself was interestingly close in many ways to Covid.  It's totally ramped up in speed and impact (basically going to kill half the humans on the planet in a few years), so the scale is different. It starts in Asia (though the scientists surmise because of a mutation of cells from nuclear testing, not jumping from animals). Many of the quarantine measures are similar and the working classes suffering and having to keep working while the privileged get to shelter were also thematically reminiscent.  Things here, though, go much further, with most of Souther England taken over by a semi-organized revolution of working class men led by a charismatic MP.  The second half has lots of violence and military combat and was quite action-packed and Clive and Pauline are of course re-united this time with him as an interrogator for the rebels and she as a captured establishment POW scientist.  He has opportunity to redeem his previously selfish character and does so in a way that was sort of tiresome and predictable.  This made for a lot of start and stop reading as I would get into the action and then get annoyed.

Another flaw is that there is a lot of telling rather than showing.  In the early stages of the spread of the disease, Maine just narrates how it is spreading in Asia with rumours of mass graves.  It made me remember the opening scenes of The Stand with the truck barrelling into the gas station and dude coming out vomiting blood.  Just so much more alive and visceral while giving you basically the same info.  Still, the telling is pretty cool and I have to credit Maine with some interesting speculation about what would happen with a disease that kills half the population.

I'm critical and would not encourage everyone to seek this book out, but it's overall not a bad read and I think worthy of inclusion in any disaster/disease subgenre reader to seek out.

 

47. The Big Bite by Charles Williams

Helpful hint for the hopelessly distracted. If you ever take a train trip, don't bring a laptop.  You will get a lot more reading done.

When I first started this, I became concerned that I had already read it.  The protagonist is a professional football player who got into a car accident that smashed his leg.  When he healed, he was mostly fine, but had lost the explosiveness that made him the player that he was.  A previous Charles Williams I had read, A Touch of Death, also starred an ex-football player who gets caught up in criminal shenanigans with a femme fatale.  However, after some checking, I confirmed that this was indeed a different novel.

He quits football and is a bit lost and down on his luck.  The accident was not his fault; a drunk driver sideswiped him and knocked him off the road. That driver had died in the accident and the insurance paid Halan 10k, but it wouldn’t cover his potential future salary loss as a pro player.  Things change when he gets a call from an insurance investigator named Purvis.  Something was fishy about the accident and he wants to pick Halan’s brains.  Purvis is a neat side character, an old skinny weak looking guy with sharp eyes who it turns out knows some kind of martial art (as Halan learns when he tries to brace him).  He also no longer works for the insurance company and is working a blackmail deal on the wife of the dead driver and wants to bring Halan in on it.  I’ll stop here with the narrative in case you read it.  You can well imagine that shit gets complicated.

Halan is smart and ruthless, almost without any feeling at all.  It’s weird to read a book and sympathize with the character and slowly realize that he is the asshole jock who is only looking out for himself.  You figure this out gradually, through the words of the widow, Julia Cannon, who is one of the better femme fatales I have encountered in a while.  She too is quite ruthless, but also philosophical, almost tragic in her outlook.

A lot goes on in this book, but there is also a lot more dialogue and life philosophy than you usually get with Williams.  It’s very dark and very fun.

 

46. To the Far Blue Mountains by Louis L'Amour

This is book 2 of the much-lauded Sacketts saga (here is the first one, Sackett's Land).  It was Paperback Warrior who first turned me on to it and so far my reading has been lukewarm with some highlights.  This book, the second chronologically in the family's story, but actually published fairly late.  This continues the story of the original patriarch, Barnabas Sackett, as he flees his life in England for Raleigh's Land in the New World.  It takes place at the end of the 16th century.

A big part of Barnabas's background and character is that he grew up in the Fens, a marshy region in eastern England which at least according to this book, was home to independent-minded people who did things like cut peat and smuggled.  It's a cool region, where the locals know the labrynthine waterways intimately and anyone else enters at their peril.

In Sackett's Land, Barnabas goes to the New World.  Here he returns and has to deal with a bunch of local drama culminating in the Queen believing he has found the long lost royal jewels of King James (he actually only found some roman coins that is what gave him the boost he needed to start his life of adventuring).  So there is a price on his head and the first third of the book is him sneaking around England, trying to get back to his ship with his bride-to-be Abigail and his compatriots in order to return to the New World, settle himself and make his way to the mountains.

He escapes and we get some fun ship trading and combat on the way to the Virginia coast.  The second half of the book, he and a new gang of adventurers, including a tough Welsh woman named Lila who is his lady's maiden and equally good with domestic skills as with sword and fists, make their way up river trying to find a place to settle.

The portrayal of the new world is odd.  L'Amour's rhetoric (through Barnabas' voice) is respectful of the Indigineous people and he recognizes that his arrival foretells a lot of change, much of which will be negative.  The individual Native characters are shown to be intelligent and human.  However, he also portrays them as in constant warfare and even a culture of weird militaristic excess.  This is all contextualized by Barnabas' idea that all men seek to expand and take over other regions, so the behaviour of the white colonists is basically the same as one group of Indigenous people taking over another one. So throughout the second half of the book, even though they are peacefully situated in the territory of the friendly Catawba, they are constantly coming under attack by other tribes.  Eventually this becomes like a rite of passage for these other tribes, to try and kill Barnabas.  He is seen as almost superhuman and a way to test their young warriors.  It feels like L'Amour was quite well-researched on the various tribes (in a similar way that he knew about the Fens and the many other historical details with which he stuffs the book), but wanted to also maintain the colonialist mythology of the west that the land had to be wrested from the warlike natives.

That being said, the portrayal of colonialism here is not as bad as I expected and I think deep down (at least from this book) that L'Amour was an appreciator of the diversity of the people of the world.  He has a passage almost a page long describing Barnabas' children's education, emphasizing how they learn from the natives, the Persian doctor, the Welsh woman, their mother, etc. so they have a rich mix of religions and folklore.  

The real problem of this book is the pacing and structure.  It jumps from years of narrative to a sudden fight scene. There is no real throughline, nor antagonist, nor conflict to hold it all together.  It's just Barnabas wanting to go to the mountains and a lot of stuff happening to him.  In the last quarter, he is suddenly old and has like 4 sons and one daughter and his wife takes two of the kids back to England forever (she's not mad, just thinks the girl needs to be educated back home and the son is smart).  We get an almost throwaway defeat of an earlier sort-of nemesis and then a final attack by the Natives which kills him followed by a coda of how they respected him.  

I wasn't going to continue with the series, so I was happy to read this guy's ranking who puts this one way down at the bottom.  I speculate that maybe L'Amour was much more interested in the history than in putting together a good story.  I'll keep my eye out for the third and pick it up if I find it cheaply. 

 

45. The General by Alan Silittoe

I picked this one up at the same garage sale where I got the Maracot Deep.  I'm not a huge fan of the British Angry Young Men, but they can write and I thought this might be interesting.  I suspected it would be one of those parable books where ideas of humanity and politics are explored in a semi-surrealistic setting, but hoped there might be enough of a real story to keep me interested.

The book begins with an orchestra being sent via train to the front lines of an unnamed 20th century war to both bring morale to the troops and to demonstrate to the enemy how superior their own culture is.  They tried to object but were overruled by the government and the conductor, who is the de facto leader and one of the two main protagonists, thinks to himself that in war everybody is a soldier who has to obey orders.  The beginning is pretty wild as the train runs through a crazier and crazier battle, while the orchestra cowers in the back, unable to act or even decide if they are supposed to be this far forward in the front.

An enemy soldier on a horse rides down the train and they are taken prisoner.  It is here we meet the general, a loyal soldier, strict disciplinarian and an elite tactician. He knows she should shoot the orchestra immediately, as they serve no purpose other than a drain on resources.  However, he hesitates, not sure why until he realizes that he does want to hear them play.

So the rest of the book is his internal struggle on whether to go against his loyalty and training and the orders of high command (confirmed via signal) or give in to his desire to hear the music and perhaps something else.  This is interspersed with the orchestra themselves contemplating their future.  

It's an interesting read, going beyond the simple "war is stupidity" and looks at our motivations as political beings.  This kind of thing isn't really my bag, but it's short and Sillitoe's descriptions of the landscape of war are grim and effective.  The metaphor of the train with the orchestra riding right into the battle and not even bothering to go to the engine or pull the emergency cord is all too parallel to the American populace right now.

44. Barking Dogs by Terence M. Green

My friend both discovered the existence of this book and then found it himself.  He gave it or lent it to me (need to clarify that).  I was very psyched at every step.  I mean who doesn't want to read about a rogue cop in future crime spree Toronto?  Unfortunately, the book itself is decidedly mediocre, so much so that I am not sure if it will make it to my bookshelf, despite its interest as a physical and cultural artifact.    

The protagonist is Mitch Helwig (🤔), a cop who has recently lost his partner.  He's on  the edge, takes 10k, the bulk of he and his wife's nest egg, and buys a Barking Dog, an infallible portable lie-detector.  He then stumbles on one of these new laser pistols on a perp he took down (cops still only carrying .38s because budget cuts), returns to the same shop and buys a super awesome bullet proof vest that is super light and blocks even lasers for a time.  He's basically armouring up and then goes over the edge and starts lasering perps.

This is a weird book.  It has several indicators of 80s crime hysteria, including the streets running wild with rapists, dope peddlers, you name it and nobody doing anything to stop it because the bigwigs are all in on it. His wife has an inner  monologue asking pre-internet stupid internet rhetorical questions like why don't we have capital punishment when everybody wants it and why not build work camps in the North and shoot any escapees?  These parts feel like half-hearted cookie cutter Dirty Harry or Death Wish  (the movies), but they stop there.  We don't even get the entertainment of the over the top right-wing crime hysteria.  

The other major thread is a somewhat thoughtful and well-written yet ultimately banal exploration of Helwig's wife Elaine contemplating and then having an affair, as Helwig spends his nights patrolling Toronto.  It feels like this part of the book is the actual real story the author wanted to right.  I almost feel like Terence wrote all the cop vigilante stuff and handed it to his wife to do the romance, but that she is actually the superior writer.

Helwig is supposedly driven by vengeance for his partner's death.  There is no detecting, he just strikes out randomly and as he closes in on a big-time mob boss running a huge industrial district bringing in guns, drugs and kidnapping little girls for snuff films and then harvesting their organs (yes, this is in the book).  Interspersed with Helwig in the present and his wife's storylines, we also get flashbacks of Mitch with his partner Mario whom he seems to love more than his wife.  There is a lot of badly written jocular back and forth between the partners (some painful puns and dumb safely racist humour), culminating like it is some big climax with Mario (with a new baby boy, of course) getting shot at the donut shop (also yes in the book).

The climax is Helwig taking out the warehouse and then the boss, but he never discovers who actually killed his partner.  He comes home and realizes that value of his family and his wife realizes she made a mistake and they I guess live happily ever after.

Very odd tone, as if a Canadian was hired to write an Executioner novel and also thought he might have a shot at the Governor General's Award.  On the plus side, the gear was cool and the descriptions of the laser wounds were gruesome and effective.