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The Tuscan Child by Rhys Bowen

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I just finished The Tuscan Child, a 2018 novel by Rhys Bowen. It’s the first book I’ve read by her. Although I can’t remember why I picked up the book (it’s way outside of the usual thrillers I’d read), it’s a worthwhile read. 

It’s a genre story in the cozy mystery category, so it’s different than what I usually read – for example, there’s no body at all until mid way through the story, which is remarkable if for no other reason than half the story takes place in WW II Italy.

The story is about a WW II British bomber pilot who is shot down over occupied Tuscany in the waning months of the war. The Allies are advancing, although the area where he is shot down is still held by the Germans. The pilot, Hugo Langley, is badly injured in the plane crash and takes refuge in a bombed-out monastery near the crash site. He is discovered by a young woman, Sofia, who is foraging for food. Sofia’s husband, conscripted into the Italian army, has been lost and presumed dead in wartime Africa, leaving Sofia to raise their small boy alone in a remote Tuscan village a few miles from the monastery where Hugo is hiding. While she nurses him back to health, they (predicably) fall in love.

Hugo is later rescued and returns to England after the war, only to find out that his titled father has died, leaving Hugo as the next Lord Langley, along with a crumbling family estate and a large estate tax bill. Almost thirty years later, Hugo’s estranged daughter Joanna (born several years after the war) is notified that her reclusive father has died, and she returns to the family home to arrange for his funeral and to clear up his estate. Among his personal effects, she finds an unopened letter to Sofia from her father dated immediately after his return from the war. The letter had been returned to him marked undeliverable. It’s a surprising discovery, because the letter mentions a beautiful baby boy. 

Wondering whether she has a half sibling in Tuscany, Joanna leaves immediately for the small town in Italy where she believes Sofia might still be living. When she arrives there, she soon discovers that some of the townspeople do not want the past brought up. Joanna persists and what she finally uncovers is even more startling (and dangerous) that what she’d thought.

It’s an interesting story structurally in that the chapters alternate between a third person narrative of Hugo’s wartime story of the crash, his injuries and his relationship with Sofia, shifting to chapters told in the first person by Joanna in the early 1970s as she finds out about her father’s death and her subsequent trip to Tuscany.

There’s plenty of Tuscan atmosphere to satisfy Under The Tuscan Sun fans. While I’m not a big cozy mystery fan, this book was pretty good.

Past Tense by Lee Child

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Past Tense is the 23rd Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. I’ve read all of them, starting with the original book, Killing Floor. Child follows a fairly simple storytelling formula, sticking closely to the Hero’s Journey as explained by Joseph Campbell. 

I say explained rather than invented by Joseph Campbell because, as was the point made by Campbell, no one “invented” the Hero’s Journey, it has always been – it’s a storytelling formula that resonates emotionally in humans across time and cultures. If you’re interested in reading about Campbell’s ideas, the starting point is probably The Hero With a Thousand Faces, although there is nearly an infinite amount of background material on the Hero’s Journey, explaining how it’s been used from Greek, Roman, Hindu, Christian, Japanese, etc. myths for all of recorded history. Most Hitchcock scripts can be charted out as following the Hero’s Journey conventions, as can the original canonical Star Wars movies (now known as IV, V, and VI), Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, most Pixar movies, and virtually all Disney movies.

Probably no literature genre adheres more closely to the Hero’s Journey conventions than mystery/thriller books, especially hard-boiled mysteries starting with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, which follow a subset of the Hero’s Journey stories often called knight-errant plots, where a lone figure protagonist wanders the earth (like Kane in Kung Fu), righting wrongs or rescuing (usually) women or children. [I’m skipping talking about the Dark Tower series by Stephen King and graphic novels.] I’ve never been able to find the original source for the definition of noir mysteries but it sounds like Chandler: “A flawed hero searches for some measure of justice in an unjust world.” Chandler’s extensive letter writing about literature in general and mystery stories in particular prompted academic reappraisals in the 1970s and 1980s of noir writing.

The zenith (or maybe the nadir, depending on your opinion of him) of knight-errant hard boiled mysteries may have been Mickey Spillane. Spillane was hugely successful (measure by sales) in the 1950s and 1960s and he’s one of the best-selling authors of all time. I’ll confess that I’m a Spillane fan and, at one point, had a copy of every one of his books. While contemporaneous reviews of his books almost universally savaged his work, his work is being reevaluated as a work of a particular political and cultural era.

Circling back to Lee Child – stories don’t get much more knight-errant-y than Jack Reacher. Like Kafka’s Odradek, Reacher has no fixed abode, although Reacher’s homelessness is by choice. Homeless, without assets other than a toothbrush, Reacher hitchhikes himself from one trouble spot to another.

I haven’t (and am probably too lazy to) gone back and read the early Reacher novels, but my impression is that the more recent ones aren’t as good as the earlier ones. That may be because the storyline was fresher then – it’s possible that I’m misremembering how good the first ones were. That said, Child’s fall off in quality is much less than Patricia Cornwell; I found her books starting with Point of Origin getting weirder and weirder and finally stopped reading her all together after the execrable Predator, her literary decline roughly coinciding with the start of the dumpster fires of her personal life.

Anyway, in this installment, Reacher ends up in New Hampshire, stopping for a few days to research some of the oral history he was told about his family. Coincidentally, a young couple from Canada on their way to a new life in Florida ends up in a motel nearby, only too late finding out that it’s like Hotel California– “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” The two plot lines merge as the story continues, but not smoothly – too much of the plot seems contrived and a little clumsy, especially the ending where one plot line is resolved in only a couple of pages with a (to my mind) unsatisfactory explanation.

Child depends a lot on the Reacher as a caricature and I think over the last ten books or so, Reacher has become more comic book hero than literary protagonist. He’s virtually indestructible, rarely personally in danger – basically a hitchhiking Superman clone in cheap clothes. Another not-completely-believable indestructible thriller protagonist is Mark Greaney’s Gray Man series, which was interesting for the first few books and has now gotten to be too much like a knockoff of Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series.

All that said, my main criticism of the more recent Reacher books is that Child doesn’t plot out stories in advance. Like, not at all. There’s an interesting article here about the writing of a book about Lee Child writing a book – a sort of recursive navel gazing exercise – but the article is interesting. Some authors who claim not to do detailed plots in advance at least start with an idea of what the story will be about and then develop a plot along the way. Lee Child however proudly claims to only do a single draft.

My current favorite thriller and mystery writers, Michael Connelly and Mark Dawson, clearly obsessively plot their books and in reading Past Tense it’s obvious that Child does not. What Child does amazingly well is control the pacing of the stories – for all my criticism of his lack of plotting, he makes up for it in the pacing of the stories. All of his books are fast and satisfying reads.

The publishing business has changed enormously in the last half century – best-selling authors can (and have) become billionaires. Besides an Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan, Child owns a mansion in the south of France. Although the business aspects of publishing have changed since Spillane’s day, is Reacher really the literary descendant of Mike Hammer?

Reckless Daughter by David Yaffe

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Reckless Daughter is a biography of singer Joni Mitchell written by David Yaffe. The book was published in 2017, so after Mitchell’s stroke and during her recovery. Yaffe is an unabashed fan of Mitchell and this is reflected in the book. Some of the reviews I’ve read about the book claim that Yaffe’s book amounts to an approved biography, which is reasonable given the number of hours Yaffe spent interviewing Mitchell over the course of several years.

Yaffe has written other nonfiction books about music, including a 2011 biography of Bob Dylan (Bob Dylan: Like A Complete Unknown) and the role of jazz music in American literature (Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing). His writing is solid and very detailed – he interviewed hundreds of people in researching Reckless Daughter and the book seems like a fair portrait of Mitchell, inarguably one of the most influential musicians and composers of the last half of the 20thcentury.

The book details her childhood, the start of her musical career, the recognition of her place in music history, her career difficulties in gaining acceptance while shifting gears to a more jazz-like musical oeuvre, and her own attempts at managing her musical legacy. The book also covers her difficult relationships with virtually every person she’s ever met: her parents, her first husband, her second husband, “rival” female musicians, her many romantic partners, producers, other musicians, music company executives and on and on and on. 

Like I said, I think the Yaffe meant the book to be a fair but sympathetic look at Mitchell, but the feeling I came away with is that while I enjoy most of her music, I’m really glad I don’t know her or live near her. She got career help from everyone from Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, James Taylor, Graham Nash and many others. In her conversations with Yaffe, she dismissed all of them (save Graham Nash, whom she apparently still cares for) as lesser talents and diminishes their assistance. And she reallydoesn’t like Jackson Brown and Joan Baez. Her difficult relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption and then reconnected with decades later is examined in detail and Mitchell doesn’t come out appearing less than a monster.

Anyway, the book is interest reading, especially if you’re curious about her songwriting or why she uses myriad guitar tunings. And to reaffirm why you’re probably glad you don’t know her personally.

Thirteen by Steve Cavanagh

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Thirteen is the third book in a series by Belfast author Steve Cavanagh with Eddie Flynn as the protagonist. Cavanagh is an attorney in Northern Ireland, Eddie Flynn is a con man, hustler, and criminal defense attorney in New York City.

Cavanagh is also half (along with Luca Veste of Liverpool) of the irregular podcasting team that does Two Crime Writers and a Microphone, which is a pretty funny podcast.

Cavanagh does an excellent job with New Yorker style dialog – his ear is accurate, especially for someone who says he never traveled to New York City until after the first two books in the series were published.

Anyway, the premise of the book is that a celebrity actor named Bobby Solomon is on trial for capital murder. One of the jurors who’s been seated for the trial is certain that Bobby isn’t guilty. He knows this because he’s the murderer.

The real murderer, Joshua Kane, goes through a complex (and body strewn) process, often using different guises, to ensure that he’s selected for the jury and, once the trial starts, he begins influencing the other jurors. Up to and including “pruning” the juror ranks.

Cavanagh does an excellent job setting traps for the reader to assume we know which juror is actually Kane; the final reveal is surprising.

It’s a fast paced, well plotted read. All of the Eddie Flynn books are good, but Cavanagh keeps getting better as the series goes on.

A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré

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I finished the 2017 book by British spy novelist John le Carré a few weeks ago. In the late 70s I read every book he’d written up to that time while I was pretending to be a Lit major in college. So, up through Smiley’s People all in the space of a few months. If he’d stopped writing then, the novels he’d written so far would have been a remarkable body of work. Over the years I read most of his other books when they came out or shortly after.

Le Carré started going seriously off the rails politically by that point in the late 70s and the next batch of books often reflected his his hatred of Israel and the United States. Some observers have noted that Le Carré has the worst characteristics of the old British political establishment: a lingering resentment of the United State supposedly usurping British world political hegemony in the post-WW II era, leaving the UK as America’s lap dog. His obsession with Jews and Israel is, I think, his way of coloring in the supposed evils of America – that the US is simply a puppet on strings pulled by Israeli politicians. All of that said, Le Carré is a towering figure in the writing world and still has the ability to describe a vision of a better England (and a better England on the world stage) than most of the British politicians.

Not that all of this post Smiley’s People work is anti-American and anti-Semitic – The Night Manager (from 1993) being one example of an amazingly well crafted and well written story.

I was eager to read Legacy of Spies if only because the reviews indicated the main character was Peter Guillam, one of Smiley’s devoted assistants and one of the minor characters in the very first Le Carré spy novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), and later on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).  The premise of Legacy of Spies is that Guillam, elderly and retired to Brittany, is called back to London to be interviewed/interrogated about events that happened leading up to the death of Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and the aftermath of that operation. It is revealed that Leamas had a child with an East German woman at the time of his death – that son, now an adult, has appeared and may be trying to claim that the British government is responsible for his father’s death. Or he may not be. 

What I found very interesting about the book is that there were obvious plot gaps and unexplained plot twists in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Legacy of Spies (written more than fifty years later) is Le Carré’s attempt to revisit that story and fill in the gaps.

The story alternates between scenes in present day Brittany and London juxtaposed against numerous flashbacks to the failed operation that lead to and resulted in Alec Leamas death. Or was it a failed operation?

Even in his mid 80s, le Carré is a formidably talented writer and this story was a great re-visit to Guillam and Smiley and the closing of the story once and for all of Alec Leamas. I enjoyed this book tremendously.

 

Crush by Frederic Dard

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Pushkin Vertigo is a London-based imprint of Penguin Random House that has been reissuing out-of-print crime, suspense, and mystery books written by a number of foreign authors. Last winter they reissued You Were Never Really Here, by Jonathan Ames, a crime novel made into a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix. 

Among the other books Pushkin Vertigo has released were English translations of a couple of novels by Frédéric Dard, a prolific French author who wrote over 300 novels, mostly from the 1950s through the 1970s. His work was, for the most part, not translated into English during his lifetime, despite his popularity in France.

Most of Dard’s novels (173 of them) featured a dashing French detective superintendent – Antoine San-Antonio; the books were also written under the pseudonym of Antoine San-Antonio. While the San-Antonio novels were mostly spy fiction, he also wrote a number of 40s and 50s-style noir pulp thrillers. Crush is one of the pulp thriller Dard novels translated and reissued by Pushkin Vertigo.

Louise, a bored 17 year old working in a factory in a fictional suburb of Paris, is the narrator of this first-person novella. She has no close friends, lives with her mother and [almost] step father, both of whom she dislikes, especially the step father. Louise becomes fascinated with an American couple living in a fancy house that she walks by on her way home from her factory job. After some machinations, she is hired by the couple as a housekeeper, enabling her to move out of her parent’s house and into the American couple’s house. 

We learn that Louise is developing a sexual obsession with the husband at the same time as it becomes increasingly apparent that she has a tenuous grasp on reality. The reader also learns that Louise is an unreliable narrator, so you have to depend on Louise’s narratives plus other facts to understand what is really going on.

As you’d expect in a noir pulp story – the American wife dies under mysterious circumstances. And, as in the best kind of noir stories, learning what appears to be the reason for the crime and who appears to be the criminal is just a set up for learning the actual murderer, who is revealed on the last page of the book.

The story doesn’t rise quite to the level of some of James M. Cain’s best work (The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity), but it’s pretty good. Relatively short, it’s a fast read that isn’t a waste of time. While Louise isn’t totally fleshed out, it’s decent dark thriller.

The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye by David Lagercrantz

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I just finished reading The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (TGWTAEFAE), by David Lagercrantz. It’s the sequel to the The Girl in the Spider’s Web (TGITSW) that I reviewed here recently and the fifth book in the Millennium series that started with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. As you call surely know, the first three books were written by the (now deceased) Swedish author, Stieg Larsson.

The latest book reunites Lisbeth Salander, journalist Mikael Bloomkvist, magazine editor and on-again/off-again love interest of Bloomkvist, Erika Berger, and Salander’s former guardian, the now quite elderly lawyer Holger Palmgren. Camilla Salander, Lisbeth’s evil twin, virtually disappears in this story, which is sort of odd given that one of the main subjects of the book is the psychology of twins.

The book opens to find Lisbeth locked up in prison for two months related to charges brought against her from her actions in TGITSW. Her imprisonment itself seems a bit of a logical leap given the TGITSW, but logic flaws happen with disappointing regularity in this book in the Salander story. While in prison, Salander assumes responsibility for protecting a young woman from Bangladesh being abused by a prison gang headed by a sadistic lesbian skinhead who fancies herself a Mussolini devotee. Salander eventually intervenes in the abuse, with predictable results. Meanwhile, Salander is manipulating the prison warden into giving her internet access so that she can continue her research into her family as well as her hacking.

While Lisbeth’s in prison, Palmgren receives an odd visit from a woman who long ago worked in the psychiatric facility where Salander was imprisoned and abused for years. The woman leaves Palmgren with a stack of documents from the clinic, hinting at the real reasons Salander ended up in the facility.

Bloomkvist and Palmgren become convinced that the documents provide evidence in a (naturally or this wouldn’t be a book) larger government decades-old conspiracy vaguely related to ethnic cleansing. Bloomkvist eventually ends up tracking down a somewhat mysterious Swedish financier who may hold the key to unlocking the story.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as any of the first four in the series – primarily because of some logic flaws in the plot and that I was disappointed that Salander has almost become a caricature in this book – she’s just short of needing a cape. That said, Lagercrantz is a good writer – the pacing and the juxtaposition of scenes among characters and interposing timelines is really good and makes the story move along faster than it probably has any right to. It’s worth reading if you’ve read the first four books, but it isn’t a reason to start the series if you haven’t already.

Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason

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I’ve been reading a lot of Celtic and Scandinavian noir stories lately and stumbled across this book, Jar City: An Inspector Erlendur Novel, a while ago and finally got around to reading it. Originally published in 2006, it takes place in Iceland.

An older man named Holberg, who lives alone, is found murdered in his apartment in Reykjavik, beaten to death with an ashtray. Few clues are found at the scene other than a note that says “I am him”. Erlendur Sveinsson, a middle-aged Inspector Detective, and his team are assigned to investigate the death. In establishing who the victim was, they learn there were plenty of reasons for people to want him dead – he was a suspect in several violent rapes years ago as well as an associate’s disappearance more recently. There is the troubling complication of the deaths of several children over the years, which may or may not be connected to Holberg’s death.

Erlendur, long divorced and single, has his own issues to deal with – a drug addicted and possible pregnant adult daughter who seems to be involved with one or more drug dealers. And there’s a missing bride.

Iceland is a central character in the story, the weather throughout the book is always rainy and often storming. At several points in the story the weather hampers the investigation.

I think the book owes a lot to the writing of Ross MacDonald, the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar, who wrote a number of hardboiled detective stories set in Southern California in the 1950s through the early 1970s. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are credited as being the originators of the detective-as-knight-errant school of hardboiled mysteries and MacDonald ably represented the genre in his Lew Archer novels.

I liked Jar City, it was certainly worthy of the annual Best Nordic Crime Novel award it received. I think Scandinavian noir can be harder for Americans to read because the names are often confusing and I certainly experienced that in this book. That said, it’s a fast paced read and worth a read.

The Girl In The Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz

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I just finished the 4thbook in the Millennium series – The Girl In The Spider’s Web(TGITSW). Published a couple of years ago (I’m still catching up), this is the sequel to the original three books – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy– written by Stieg Larsson. It’s been a few years since I read the original trilogy, but I remember my impressions as being: well plotted, maybe a bit clumsy as to writing, but with really great characters, especially when considered as to how they’d interact. No question that Lisbeth Salander is one of the best main characters in thriller fiction of the last couple of decades.

Larsson died of a heart attack having completed the three books while working on the fourth. I recall reading somewhere that he’d planned that the Millennium series would eventually be ten novels. It was clear from the trilogy that one or more, maybe all, of the future books would involve a character unseen but present in the first books. Spider’s Web is the start of that part of the story.

The main thrust of the TGITSW revolves around the NSA and Swedish Security Police’s involvement in possibly aiding and abetting industrial espionage. There’s an artificial intelligence aspect element to the plot, but it’s not especially significant, which is probably for the best as AI is probably difficult to write about to a general audience – certainly Lagercrantz doesn’t even attempt it. A Swedish computer academic working on developing AI, Frans Balder, uncovers possible collusion between the NSA, a large research corporation and elements of a sophisticated Russian criminal organization active in Scandinavia. Balder has a young son and a scandalously sleazy ex-wife. The boy, August, is an autistic savant unable to speak.

As is usual in the Millennium books, Blomkvist is world weary and the magazine is in financial trouble. Blomkvist stumbles across the NSA story when Balder calls him in the middle of the night wanting to tell all – thinking that publicly releasing what he knows will keep him and August safe from reprisals by the Russian gang. Balder is too late and pays for it with his life. What exactly he knows ends up being a bit of a MacGuffin– it is or isn’t revealed at the end and isn’t important for the denouement of the story.

As you’d guess, Salander finds she has a lot in common with August – I’m resisting the temptation to say they get on like a house on fire, but you get the idea. In Lagercrantz’s telling, Salander comes across as a bit of a Lara Cross-type character – almost a comic book heroine. Some of it may be due to the difficulty in stepping into someone else’s shoes in authoring the series and some of it probably is just a function of these kinds of thrillers always end up with characters who are less realistic than we expect (i.e. Jack Reacher, Kay Scarpetta, etc.).

All in all, I think that Lagercrantz does a better job plotting the book than Larsson did with the original three and he is definitely a more skilled fiction writer – the book deftly interweaves multiple points of view into a very fast paced timeline and at no point did I feel left behind as a reader. TGITSW was a good summer read.

I’ll definitely read the next book in the series.

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

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I finished The Immortalists  the other day, a second novel by Chloe Benjamin. Full disclosure – I haven’t read her first book and in fact, cannot even remember why I picked this one up. The cover blurb may have struck my fancy, I’m not sure.

The story starts in 1969; the Gold family lives in New York City, and the story centers around the four siblings Varya, Daniel, Klara, and Simon. That the Gold parents are observant Jews is emphasized in the first section of the book, although it only comes up peripherally in the remainder of the story. Varya is 13, Simon the youngest is 7. They inciting event in the story is that the children have heard about a psychic or fortune teller who can tell people the exact day that they will die. After asking around the neighborhood, the children visit the psychic as a group, although when the get to her apartment, the psychic will only see them one at a time. Several of the four are upset after talking with the fortune teller, especially Simon. Simon also won’t tell his siblings what he learned other than to say that she told him he will die young.

The remainder of the book is broken up into four sections – one section that tells the story of each child’s life. In an interesting audio interview with Signature that I found here, Benjamin, responding to the interviewer’s question agrees that the story has Rashomon-like structure. Actually, I disagree with that assessment – Rashomon tells the story of a single incident from the four particpants’ points of view, each section being a different aspect of the same physical incident. Kurosawa then shows, in the climactic scenes in the film, by providing additional detail and context, that the four separate viewpoints merge into a single truth. Which isn’t really what happens in The Immortalists.

I found that The Immortalistswas much more similar in structure to The Deptford Trilogy, written by Canadian author Robertson Davies. The Deptford Trilogy consists of three books, written in the early 1970s, that tell the life stories of three boys who grew up in a small fictional town in Ontario, Canada around the time of WWI and how their lives are affected by a single precipitating event. The opening scenes in the first book explain that a boy, Percy Staunton, throws a snowball one winter afternoon at another boy, Dunstan Ramsey. Ramsey ducks at the last second and the snowball hits a pregnant woman instead. The woman goes into labor and gives birth prematurely to a boy named Paul Dempster, who has lifelong physical issues related to being born so prematurely.

The first book in the trilogy is called Fifth Business and recounts the precipitating event and then goes on to tell the life story of Dunstan Ramsey. Tortured by guilt for ducking a snowball meant for him, he becomes a college teacher after being badly injured in WWI and honored as a war hero. The book also tells the story of Percy Staunton, who is seemingly unaffected by the incident (or much of anything), and who goes on to become a wealthy businessman and Canadian politician. The woman hit by the snowball, Mary Dempster may or may not be insane, but in any case spends years in an insane asylum, which only adds to Dunstan’s feelings of guilt. Ramsey befriends Mary’s son Paul and teaches him some basic card tricks. Paul eventually drops out of school and runs away to join a circus. While traveling some years later, Dunstan meets a famous magician, Magnus Eisengrim, who Dunstan eventually finds out is the now grown Paul Dempster.

The second book in the trilogy is The Manticore, and tells the story of Percy Staunton’s life through a series of conversations that Percy’s son David Staunton has with a Jungian psychoanalyst. The grown-up David is a successful lawyer who undergoes a spiritual crisis as he learns through therapy that his father was not moral hero that David had thought.  David eventually comes to hate Magnus Eisengrim through a twisted logic that the boy born as a result of the precipitating even is somehow the person responsible for David finding out the true nature of his father.

Paul Dempster/Magnus Eisengrim’s story is the subject of the concluding book in the trilogy, World of Wonders. Magnus comes to tell the story of his life in this book as he relates his experiences to a movie studio that is making a biographical film of the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. Magnus’s story covers some of the same ground as the first two novels, but from his viewpoint, however, the story is really of Magnus’s life in the world of magic, circuses, and vaudeville.

Long explanation, but I can strongly recommend reading The Deptford Trilogy – Robertson Davies was an excellent writer and this trilogy is probably his best-known work (although Rebel Angels (part of The Cornish Trilogy) is also well known and an excellent book).

Anyway, that’s my argument for The Immortalists being more like The Deptford Trilogy than Rashomon.The Immortalistsspends a lot of time in the San Francisco Bay Area after the first part introducing the psychic is explained. Klara and Simon run away to San Francisco in the late 1970s, Simon comes out as gay and Klara tries (successfully) to find herself. This part of the book reminded me of a cross between The Deptford Trilogy and Tales Of The City – the 70s and 80s serialized set of novels set in San Francisco.

Klara eventually becomes a magician and leaves the Bay Area. The third and fourth sections of the book cover the lives of Daniel and, in turn, Varya. Daniel is probably the least well-developed of the characters, Benjamin has said in interviews that she had trouble with a character that was a man as well as a political conservative. [That Daniel isn’t a political conservative may say a lot about whether Benjamin actually knows any.] In any case, the novel covers some big topics: family tradition and the responsibilities family members have to each other, the ethics of animal testing, the ethics of life extension research and the philosophy of whether humans should be seeking to artificially extend our lives, and place of magical realism in a modern world. The book touches on, but I’d like to have seen explored in more depth, the idea of predestination – it’s really the underpinning of the precipitating event but it isn’t discussed much in the book.

Lastly, the only real criticism I have of the book is that the ending seems rushed – without giving any spoilers, a previously unknown person from one of the character’s past is introduced toward the end of the book and that portion of the book (again, it touches on the entire predestination thoughts) maybe should have been fleshed out more.

All in all, I thought the book was a worthwhile read, although I’m (obviously) also recommending The Deptford Trilogy.