Mrs. Jewell and the wreck of the General Grant.

 

 
           In May of 1866, the General Grant, ‘ a fine three-master sailing out of Boston,’ was wrecked with huge loss of life off the Sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands in the Southern Ocean, 465 kilometres from the southernmost tip of New Zealand.  Only fifteen of the eighty-three people aboard survived, and despite many searches over the intervening one hundred and fifty seven years, the wreck has never been found.  The General Grant was on its way to England, taking families back to their homes, some with considerable fortunes from the Australian Gold fields, not to mention a big, secret cache of gold from the London, a ship that had foundered.  Newly-weds Mary and Joseph Jewell are passengers, their clothes considerably weighed down by the gold that Mary has sewn into the seams and pockets.  When the nuggets are exchanged for pounds they will have enough to buy a farm in Clovelly, Joseph’s birthplace.  The future looks rosy.

            Until fog and swells push them off course and the worst happens – Mary wasn’t the only one to think of sewing gold into pouches and pockets:  when the ship starts to sink the weight of the gold drags many down to a watery death, and the children – the children have no chance.  The deaths of those innocents will remain in Mary’s nightmares for the rest of her life.  And she will never know why she survived along with fourteen others out of a complement of eighty-three:  fate was either being kind, or looking for her to play with.

            Christina Sanders brings the great tragedy to superb, terrible reality.  Narrated by Mary, it is though we are reading her journal over her shoulder as she writes, especially when she recounts their initial attempts to light a fire so that they wouldn’t die of the cold:  five of their six matches were damp and wouldn’t ignite;  the sixth match was carefully dried by the heat of the owner’s body, and when that last match took, everyone’s faith in God was renewed – until the next crisis. 

            No-one had any idea how long it would take for another ship to sail past, and to their horror, despite their permanent bonfires blazing on high ground, one did do just that – sail past and keep on going.  All hope disappeared for a time after that episode, but it didn’t die completely, especially with the discovery of wild pigs and goats, which made a great change from seal blubber.  There is much to be said of the resilience of the human spirit, and Ms Sanders tells this epic true story with grace and reverence for man’s survival instinct.    SIX STARS.   

 

Scythe, by Neal Shusterman.                  Young Adults.

 

     

       This is not a recent publication, but it is the first book of a trilogy that I absolutely HAVE to finish.  Dystopian fiction, especially for Young Adults, is now a popular genre, especially with the advent of ‘The Hunger Games’ and it is a fitting reflection of the current turmoil and uncertainty that rules our world.  In ‘Scythe’, Neal Shusterman takes us on an all-too-realistic journey into the near future, where mankind has evolved far enough to have eliminated war, disease, hunger and its attendant misery:  no-one dies any more because all the usual ways to die have been eliminated;  instead, on a percentage basis according to Old World statistics, people are visited by a Scythe, a person specifically selected to kill them – whether they want to die or not.  There is no argument.  It shall be done, regardless of the protests and sometimes rebellion from the chosen one’s family:  it is their time.  Whether they agree or not.

            Scythe Faraday has taken on two new apprentices, even though it is usual to train only one at a time, but he is impressed with both of them for differing reasons:  Rowan happened to be nearby when his high-school classmate was ‘called’ into the Principal’s Office.  He was shocked to witness the boy’s death (called Gleaning), even though he tried to intervene it wasn’t ‘his time’.  He was trying to compose something empathetic to tell the boy’s parents when he is horrified to find his parents have been visited by Scythe Faraday:  if they will apprentice Rowan to the Scythe, then they will have immunity from death too – for a year.  Bye, Rowan!

            Citra, a pupil at the same high school, has also been chosen for her fearlessness at standing up to Scythe Faraday when he visited her family’s apartment, requesting dinner as he waited for their neighbour to come home.  (Scythes customarily eat wherever and whenever they like, for free.  Who would be brave enough to charge them?)  She had so many scathing things to say to him that he admired her courage.  Now, look where that has got her!  And one thing that unites Rowan and Citra irrevocably:  neither of them want to kill anyone, much less learn the myriad ways of death that Scythe Faraday wants to teach them.  It’s great that they have earned immunity for their families (for one year), but at what cost to themselves?

            Neal Shusterman has constructed a chillingly real future world, cleverly combining the former glories of Old World History with a frightening shift in the moral compass of the New.  Let’s hope he’ll never be right!  FIVE STARS.       

 

           

 

 

 The Dead of Winter, by Stuart MacBride.

 

          Detective Constable Edward Reekie is wondering why he ever became a Police Officer, especially when he is doing all the driving through unrelenting winter snowfall to a remote Scottish village to deliver an old crim on his last legs – and from  the sound of him, his last lung: he’s also transporting his ungrateful and surly temporary boss, Detective Inspector Victoria Montgomery-Porter, who hopes to get a deathbed confession from said old crim Marky Bishop about various places that he has stashed money from his many bank heists.

            ‘Good luck with that, Bigtoria’ thinks her chauffeur unkindly.  He is not looking forward to Glenfarach, their destination;  it’s literally full of felons, a kind of a Last Stop before they kiss their evil backsides goodbye.  It’s a dumping ground for Scotland’s worst paedos, rapists, murderers and sickos, the kind whom ordinary people don’t want in their neighbourhood, and will set fire to their accommodation to drive them out, so the authorities have come up with the ideal solution:  convert an abandoned country estate into a mini-open prison, staffed by Police Scotland’s finest.

            All very well and good, except that driving conditions are frightening and Edward is having a hard time keeping their piece-of-shite squad car on the road, and his nasty intolerant boss is demanding more speed.  The only thing Edward can do is say ‘Yes, Gov’, and hope that the need for speed won’t see them all dead in a ditch, or wrapped in a loving embrace with a Scottish Pine.

            The nightmare trip doesn’t end at their destination;  shortly after their arrival, the first murder occurs, that of a child-molester whom the ‘ordinary’ crims despise, then despite the continuing unrelenting snowstorm, someone unknown (well, of course!) sets fire to the child-molester’s house, destroying all forensic evidence, including his body, which had been most cruelly tortured.  Bigtoria is beside herself, not only because everything has gone up in smoke, but because all the technology has gone on the blink, not to mention ordinary power:  they are literally functioning in the dark.  And it also means that reinforcements won’t arrive from the nearest police centre until the weather dies down.  How is any one supposed to police efficiently in such conditions?  Which are only exacerbated by the next almost identical killing.

            Stuart MacBride never disappoints:  he creates wonderfully credible characters, and in this stand-alone story he has woven so many twists and turns into the narrative that I could only gape at his cleverness.  And it’s all done – not with mirrors – but a fantastic humour and feel for dialogue that has always made each of his books a pleasure to read.  FIVE STARS.    

 

                   

 

Dark Music, by David Lagercrantz.

 

  

          Swedish writer David Lagercrantz is internationally known for creating well-written and credible sequels to the late Stieg Larsson’s ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ series after that author’s premature death from a heart attack;  now he has used terrible historic events of the beginning of this century as the background to the brutal murder of Jamal Kabir, an Afghani refugee in Stockholm – and he introduces as his main protagonists his modern version of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to solve the crime.

            Holmes played the violin:  his modern-day equivalent, Professor Hans Rekke, was a concert pianist of some renown.  Holmes has frighteningly brilliant deductive powers, as does Rekke, but Holmes liked his opium pipe, and Rekke has his very own drug-dealer Freddie to supply him with whatever he needs.  Holmes was sad and solitary, and Rekke is bipolar, prone to fits of manic energy or abysmal despair. 

Lagercrantz’s version of Watson, that shrewd, loyal and trusty sidekick, is Micaela Vargas, from a Chilean refugee family who is a new and inexperienced police officer seconded to the Kabir killing.  She comes from a tough suburb of Stockholm and has a couple of brothers on the wrong side of the law;  naturally, they are not keen on her choice of work but too bad:  she loves her job and she’s good at it.  Especially when she meets Rekke and observes his marvellous logic in action – after he recovers from a suicide attempt, rescued by her!  And after he recovers sufficiently enough to use his mind for more positive and productive reasoning, Rekke and Micaela realise that there is a lot more to Kabir’s murder than they could ever have imagined, including the sinister influence of The Good Guys – the American CIA, who are anything BUT, in regard to this crime 

Throughout the whole story is a musical theme, that of thwarted ambition: Kabir in his youth had dreams of being an orchestral conductor, but  the forbidding by the Taliban after the Russians left Afghanistan of all musical forms (particularly decadent western classical music), and the destruction of all instruments used to produce it –‘because it leads us away from the only beauty that means anything, the love of Allah’ stifled any such dreams, and at the time of his murder he was a garage mechanic – and a part-time football referee.  And CIA informer.

Mr Lagercrantz has given us two worthy modern-day successors to Holmes and Watson and the plot fairly sizzles along, especially in the later stages, but I have to say that Ms Vargas had a two-dimensional air about her initially – which could have been translation problems. Anyway, I look forward with great anticipation to their next adventures.  FOUR STARS.