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.