Great Reads for Great Readers

GREAT READS FOR SEPTEMBER, 2012

Black Boy, White School, by Brian F. Walker          Young Adult fiction

Anthony (Ant) Jones is an angry young man:  he is angry that at fourteen he is the youngest of three brothers and has to go shopping for groceries (and worse) for his acid-tongued Momma, simply because Andre and Darnell ‘are too old to be bossed around and too big to hit’;  he’s frightened because East Cleveland, Ohio, the city he lives in, is dying from all the diseases that have disabled so many American cities:  closure of long-established industries and consequent unemployment;  civic mismanagement and the apathy and loss of hope by welfare-dependent inhabitants – what will become of them all? 

Fortunately for Ant (not that he thinks so), a scholarship with free tuition for deprived minority kids is available in a top boarding school in Maine, Belton Academy: Ant’s Momma is determined that he will take this unheard of opportunity to better himself, to make a life for himself that won’t end like his friend Mookie’s, dead at 15 in a drive-by shooting.  He has to stop ‘acting ghetto’, seize this chance for a different life through education, and by God, he’s going to do it if she kills him to make him go to Maine!  When his choices are presented to him in such a way, Ant realises he HAS no choice:  he has to go to Belton, or get his Ass broken big-time by his Momma.  She’s still bigger than him.

His first months in Belton are like living on another planet with friendly but remote aliens:  everyone calls him Tony, even though he has stressed numerous times that his name is Ant;  his room-mate, Brody, is a white stoner with racist parents;  everyone assumes for some inexplicable reason that because Ant is black he is from New York as are the few other black students;  and worst of all, there seems to be an accepted practice called ‘hazing’ of freshmen – bullying by another name:  all new boys are tossed into ‘the brook’ by older students as part of ‘initiation rituals’.  Ant decides immediately that no white dude is going to do that to him, particularly when he finds out that the brook in question is actually a toxic waste spill.  Ant has never heard of hazing.  No-one would do that in East Cleveland – ‘back home, it would get someone shot.’

Ant’s solution to his freshman initiation, and his struggles to become accepted and respected in his white environment is a riveting story told with great empathy by Brian Walker, who has recounted through Ant’s experiences his own difficulties at the same age, when he was sent to a similar prestigious school far from all that was familiar to him, all that was family, and all that was ghetto.  He writes from the heart about Ant’s year at Belton, because it was his year too, and his year to return home to find that he was too scared any more to live in that terrible, hopeless environment, especially when another dear friend is murdered.  His desperation is complete when he HAS to leave Belton, which, for all its alien beginnings has provided him with the tools for a new way of looking at the world, because his Momma can no longer afford to pay for the boarding fees and textbooks for his ‘free’ education.  Where does he go from here?  He knows that white society will never be a comfortable fit, but he is too different now just to blend back into his old, sick neighbourhood:  the choices he makes will be his alone, and Brian Walker, by writing this wonderful book, has proved that the Ants of this world can still make the right, courageous decisions.  This was truly a great read.

Gods and Beasts, by Denise Mina

Detective Sergent Alex Morrow is back again in this taut and clever thriller from premier crime writer Denise Mina.  Ms Mina writes of Glasgow and its mean streets and meaner inhabitants with great assurance and skill, drawing the reader effortlessly into Alex’s Jekyll and Hyde world, introducing new characters and giving the existing ones lesser or greater roles as the plot demands.

Brendan Lyons takes his 4 year-old grandson to the post office to buy Christmas stamps;  while they are standing in the queue a gunman bursts through the door to rob the place.  In an act of tremendous bravery, Brendan passes his grandson to the person behind him (‘He’s yours’) then calmly proceeds to help the robber gather the cash, but when that is accomplished, he is shot to death, riddled with bullets by the gunman.  Even more horrifying is the fact that the robber and he knew each other.

Martin Pavel is the young man charged by Brendan with the safekeeping of his precious grandson.  He is a damaged soul, (as are we all) unsure of his place in the world, an inheritor of great wealth but at a loss to know what to do with it:  DS Morrow and her partner Harris are baffled by his presence in Glasgow, and his reluctance to divulge anything about himself;  in fact, the more they delve into Martin and Brendan and his family’s past, the more confusing and labyrinthine the case becomes – especially when the name of a very well-known local politician surfaces in the course of their investigations.  But DS Morrow is nothing if not dogged, determined to weave all the loose threads into a credible pattern that she can believe in. She presses on, only to find that to her horror, information is being withheld – from within:  by her own department.

Ms Mina can evoke atmosphere and construct characters so believable that her word pictures are indelible and have the reader, however disquieted by her no-frills prose, calling for more:  However, having stated the obvious, I  have to say that ‘Gods and Beasts’ is a bleak story, as bleak as the Glasgow weather at Christmas time – there are no happy endings, just respite and escape from tragedy for some of the characters, and the exposure of others to the criminal and corrupt underbelly of organisations they had thought unassailable to the gangster element.  It may be the city of Glasgow is so corrupt that it is irredeemable, unable to be saved - or forsaken - ‘by those who live with self-sufficiency outside the city walls –be they Gods or Beasts’:  regardless, by the time the reader reaches the explosive conclusion of this fine story it is clear that  Alex’s problems are just beginning, but it is a great consolation to know that once again, DS Morrow has won a battle in a long, frustrating and exhausting war.  Highly recommended.

The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick De Witt

It is 1851, and the Gold Rush has started in California:  previously sane and rational men have been struck by Gold Fever, leaving their loved ones and all they hold dear in order to scrabble about in dirt and streams to find the Mother lode,  presenting themselves as perfect victims to all the opportunists who spring from nowhere to exploit them.

Such a person is the Commodore, so enormously rich that he can afford a staff of hired killers to dispose of those who have not obeyed his orders to relinquish their paltry, new-found wealth – or more importantly inventions to him.  His premier killers are Eli and Charlie Sisters, brothers who are justly feared for their utter ruthlessness in carrying out their master’s instructions:  they are not to be trifled with and  older brother Charlie is proud of their reputation as murderers without peer.  Eli is not so sure;  killing people is not a comfortable fit for him and he wants to get out of ‘the business’, but his loyalty to his brother, his feeling that he must be there to protect him – from himself as much as their foe, creates almost unbearable conflict within him.  He is determined that their latest job will be their last, even though Charlie pours scorn on Eli’s distaste for their occupation – it doesn’t worry him either that their mother has banished them from the family home ‘until they change their murdering ways’.  Charlie has a magnificent unconcern for scruples of any kind:  life is for living until you die, by natural means or otherwise.

Their latest assignment from the Commodore is to track down a prospector who has done him wrong, Hermann Kermit Warm by name:  the brothers must travel from Oregon City to San Francisco to find Warm, then dispatch him to his last reward, returning with a secret formula that is of great interest to the Commodore.

So begins the brothers’ last great adventure, an odyssey peopled with some of the most singular characters in contemporary fiction, narrated by Eli with marvellous empathy and humour, and when the brothers aren’t shooting everything that moves they are either festering with sibling rivalry or banding together in brotherly loyalty, particularly in a tight spot.

This novel was shortlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize and in this reader’s opinion deserved to win it, not only because the actual winner failed to engage me half as successfully as did Patrick de Witt’s perfect little literary gem, but because of the superb depiction of a particularly lawless, dog-eat-dog time in the Old West, and the underlying themes of great good, great evil, and greater forgiveness.  FIVE STARS.

Harbor Nocturne, by Joseph Wambaugh

Joseph Wambaugh first made his considerable reputation as an author of top class crime novels thirty years ago with ‘The New Centurions’, a story of the Los Angeles Police Department and the men and women who went out every day onto the city’s streets to patrol and protect its citizens. ‘Harbor Nocturne’, his latest story, doesn’t deviate from the same theme but concentrates more on Hollywood and the Los Angeles port of San Pedro for its action.

As always, Joseph Wambaugh has produced a page-turner par excellence, at the same time displaying his intimate knowledge of the job and  the many horrors and dangers faced by LA’s finest, for Mr Wambaugh was himself a policeman until he started to write and he still has strong links to law enforcement - which makes me wonder how many of his excellent characters and situations are based on actual people and events.  In this story we see the return of Flotsam and Jetsam, inseparable police partners and committed surfers in their spare time, even though Jetsam had a serious accident in a previous book which has resulted in the amputation of his foot and the fitting of a prosthesis.  Dude, does this slow him down?  No way:  Flotsam proudly proclaims to a bewildered vice sergeant (who is hoping to enlist Jetsam’s services as an undercover cop to investigate some baddies who have an unhealthy interest in amputees) ‘You should see all the Emmas ogle the robo kahuna with the bionic hoof.  It’s all beer, bubble baths, and blow jobs for him.  Me, I’m happy just to get his leftovers.’

‘He’s always pimping me out at Malibu’, replies Jetsam.  ‘He, like, tries to sell them on sympathy disrobing for a handicapped kahuna.’

Ah, it’s all great stuff, even though I understood about as much of the dialogue as the Vice Sergeant did, but Flotsam and Jetsam are just two of a great cast, not least of whom is Marius Tatarescu, a Romanian-born cop whose heavy accent and winged eyebrows elicit many enquiries as to his origins.  Depending on his mood he ‘is on secondment from KGB’, or on the subject of his bachelorhood: ‘I am fourth-generation vampire from Transylvania.  I suck too much blood from all girls I date, so nobody likes to marry me.’  He also has a few problems mastering American slang – a ‘piece of shit’ becomes ‘you are a slice of turd.’ Fair enough.

Then there is Chester Toles, known among his colleagues as The Unicorn because his knack for skiving off and disappearing was so uncanny that everyone says he is a mythical beast that didn’t exist.  But Chester is 59 years old and his retirement is imminent;  he refuses to do anything that could get him into trouble, let alone injured or God forbid,  KILLED before he can march through the doors of Hollywood Precinct with his pension intact – until he attends a child killing, where the murderer goes off to the local bar for a beer without a backward glance at the two-year old baby he beat to death:  Chester’s tipping point has been reached.  He has had enough and he deals out the vigilante justice the situation demands, then gives the police conduct investigators the Bird when they start screaming Police Brutality:  it’s time to leave and go fishing.

There are several subplots dealing with waterfront corruption at San Pedro and the human trafficking of migrant women into the brothels of Hollywood;  all the storylines are skilfully interwoven to create a very satisfying and credible read.  Mr Wambaugh is that rare storyteller:  he can make his readers laugh out loud, then in the next chapter reduce them to tears.  What a gift.