Here’s a round-up of some of my recent reading, including some recent titles that had been on my radar for a while and finally popped up at the public library.

Time

One of these was Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which I got interested in because Bradley was a brilliant guest on Backlisted. She was talking about Monkey King: Journey to the West—this was another instance in which I ended up more interested in the guest’s book than the book under discussion! I mostly enjoyed The Ministry of Time, until towards the end I got confused by the intricacies of its time travel plot and felt that I would have enjoyed a straight-up historical novel about the Franklin expedition more.

Reading Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Vol. I) for my book club last week I decided that for now I have reached my limit for novels that mess with time—I found Balle’s novel beautiful, meditative, and thought-provoking, but also annoying as I puzzled over the logistics and tried not to let what seemed like the improvisational or ad hoc nature of its underlying “theory” get in the way of what else it had to offer. At least Balle’s novel is deliberately anti-plot, which made it easier to let the metaphysics slide. Its focus on repetition and the consequences, especially psychological and emotional, of not being able to get back into time also made me think, often very sadly, of Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow, and my own struggle to fully re-enter time since Owen died.

Murder

Paradoxically, perhaps, given how regularly I teach our mystery & detective fiction course, I don’t read a lot of crime fiction these days, but I am always scouting for recent titles that might be useful for updating my reading list. This was part of what drew me to Kevin Powers’s A Line in the Sand, which sounded like a good combination of crime and politics—which it is. It’s a pretty good read, fast-paced and character driven. It turns on an attempt to cover up a massacre by private military contractors in Iraq: one of the witnesses was a former interpreter now in America who finds himself pursued by those who need that past erased to secure a massive new contract. So we get both the scary world of the shady companies profiteering from war and the interconnected (and also scary and shady) world of the politicians and military leaders who are also complicit. Most of the other main characters are also in one way or another suffering because of the Iraq war; its far-reaching consequences for those who fought and for those on the home front are among the novel’s themes. I thought it was a solid crime novel, if a bit too much of a thriller for my own personal taste: by the end the bodies have piled up, and the deaths are grim and violent, and the solution is action-driven rather than ratiocinative. If this is your kind of crime novel, I recommend it as a good example of the kind!

Mayhem

Anders Lustgarten’s Three Burials is also quite violent and action-driven, but underlying it is a less cynical or discouraging vision than I felt was at the core of A Line in the Sand. Its Thelma and Louise-style plot (a connection made explicit in the novel itself) focuses on Cherry, a nurse who happens upon the body of a murdered refugee (we already know him as Omar) on a British beach. Cherry is carrying a lot of grief and trauma, including her wrenching memories of the worst of the COVID pandemic (people currently downplaying the severity of the crisis and restricting access to the vaccines that have helped us get to a better place would benefit from the terse but powerful treatment it gets here). She is also grieving her son’s death by suicide, and the resemblance of the dead man to her son adds to her determination to somehow get his body to the young woman whose photo he was clutching when he died.

There are a lot of moving parts to Three Burials, including Omar’s story; the story of the two cops on patrol with an outfit called “Defenders of the Realm” to intercept refugees’ boats, one of whom is, as we know from the beginning, Omar’s murderer; and the story of Cherry’s husband and daughter, also mourning and now trying to figure out what to do when Cherry ends up on the run with Omar’s body, with one cop (initially recalcitrant, eventually repentant) in her car and the other, angry and violent, giving chase. It’s a zany plot; what I liked about it was that it is a kind of cri de coeur, not just on Cherry’s behalf but on ours, collectively. What is a person of conscience and compassion even supposed to do in a world full of so much ignorance, hate, mismanagement, suspicion, and malice? Why are we scapegoating people instead of helping them, turning them away instead of welcoming them, making things worse instead of making things better? Why is the world apparently trying to forget what we (could have) learned from COVID instead of applying its lessons? The weird thing about Thelma and Louise is that despite its tragic ending, there is something joyful about it; Cherry’s wild ride has something of the same quality as she is driven forward by despair but also by a hope she refuses to give up that there must be something she can do, some difference she can still make, no matter how small.