Archangel

 

Archangel – Robert Harris

Robert Harris is slowly becoming a highly regarded and popular historical fiction author.  Emphasis, though, in most cases should be placed on “fiction” as opposed to “historical”.  The handful of books that I’ve read by him have a lot of “what ifs” and speculation involved, and don’t exactly tell a nice little fictitious story in the midst of important historical events.  Example: his first novel “Fatherland” was a novel that took place in Berlin in the early 1960s. The difference in the particular novel, though, was the assumption that Germany had won the war.

Archangel doesn’t have that radical of an alternative agenda, but the story definitely involves some eye-brows raising scenarios that, if we imagine, might have possibly just maybe could have happened.  A big strength of Harris’s storytelling is that he does a splendid job with atmospheres.  Even if we don’t believe the story nor like the conclusion, we feel such a part of our surroundings, that we enjoy the story regardless. In Archangel, the story begins in Moscow in the early 1990s. The cold war is “over”, but Russia hasn’t exactly morphed into anything resembling the state of New Hampshire.  The place is cold, uncertain, fearful, antagonistic, and many yearn for the days of hardline communism that has now died a drawn-out death.

We meet a British historian named Fluke Keslo who is after a scoop.  His subject is a former NKVD officer who once served in Josef Stalin’s inner circle. This man has a story to tell Kelso about Stalin, and it’s not pretty.  Well, apparently old Russia has a lot of dirt, and the “new” Russia doesn’t want this story made public, so a political thriller is now in place with a lot of cat-and-mouse. Kelso, being a “dedicated” journalist, apparently doesn’t care about threats of being locked in a modern-day gulag for the rest of his life.  No, gosh-darnit.  He’s a journalist, and he’s determined to uncover the truth.

So he pairs with an American journalist, and is aided by some family members of his subject, and his long journey takes that begins in Moscow, migrates to a northern port of Russia named Archangel.  We feel it all.  The cold, the destitution, the isolation, the threat of those in power chasing the two.  It’s quite riveting, and if we’re honest, the journey here comes across as more interesting than the final destination.

The ending of this story left me a bit wanting.  I wasn’t quite sure I felt like we reached a satisfying conclusion.  There were bits of unbelievability, and a few too many government types running around with conflicting agendas. Make no mistake, Russia has never been a happy place, but everything seemed a bit too confused with so many “authority” figures running around with somewhat conflicting agendas.

Still, though, I enjoyed the ride.  I enjoyed the surroundings – as unpleasant as they were – as they gave me a strong taste of the people and places of the time.  Whether the action is taking place in the large surroundings of Moscow, or the isolated fringes of the forest-covered Archangel, it all seemed so hollow and real.  It might have been my approach and imagination that left me a bit unmoved by the end of the story. It’s possible that if my mind had been able to comprehend things slightly differently, I could have felt the same things that the author was trying to convey.  Still, when someone such as myself reads historical fiction, most of the enjoyment comes from the “historical” element, and this story, like all of Harris’s other works, didn’t let me down.

 

Texasville

 

Texasville – Larry McMurtry

This is one of the strangest books that I’ve ever read; and not really in a good way.  This book tries to be funny.  Note that statement: “Tries to be funny”. It’s essentially an oxymoron.  You’re either funny, or you’re not.  Ok, I did laugh at times, but most of all, this thing just fails because the story is so outlandish and the characters so bizarre, it never quite works.  The characters aren’t believable, yet granted that never seems to be the author’s intention. Reading this book reminded me of the movie “Raising Arizona”.  You were never supposed to take any of those characters seriously either, yet the whacked-out characterizations made you laugh out loud most of the time.  Maybe had my imagination been a bit better, I could have imagined such outrageousness in these pages, but it simply never worked for me.

To add to the irony, this movie is a sequel to the well-known critically acclaimed “The Last Picture Show”. If I’m honest, I enjoyed that film more than I did the book, but the point I’m trying to make is that the atmosphere and story of these two novels were so radically different, that I simply couldn’t conceive myself that I was reading about the same town and the same people.

It’s now the early 1980s.  The town that was dying thirty years ago has had an oil boom and it’s caused many in the town to become wealthy overnight. But as we know, then the OPEC driven glut hit, and now everyone in the town is broke again. Especially Duane Moore. He was one of the main characters in the first story. He’s now a 40-something year old with an obnoxious wife, four horrible children, and he’s about 60 million dollars in debt. The entire story is told through Duane’s eyes, and he seems to be the only normal person in this town.  A normal person couldn’t exist in such circumstances. We see Duane slog around his life trying to find some sort of normalcy, but such dreams are ridiculously unrealistic. You know you have a bad story when the most likable character in the book is a dog.

The ”plot”, for lack of a better word, involves the centennial celebration of the neighboring town, Texasville.  Apparently, Texasville is even more depressed and depressing than where these characters live (the fictitious town of Thalia, Texas), yet that won’t stop the locals from putting on a spectacle, including a highly involved theatrical production that starts with the Earth’s creation (Adam and Eve), all the way through the 20^th century.  All I could think of was “who in a town like this could put something together like this? And more importantly, who would actually attend?”  As I’ve implied, this book simply was too idiotic in terms of realism.

Then there’s the sex.  Good Lord.  I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that had this much sex.  It seems as though even though the residents of Thalia understand the word “marriage”, they’re clueless to what the word “monogamy” means.  It’s too much.  It’s never good when a man is sleeping with several women, and is somewhat in competition with his own son over several of these women.  Have you ever seen those detective shows where the cops have a bulletin board filled with notecards of different people with arrows pointing to the other notecards?  You know, so they can try to keep up with all of the relationships?  You literally need to do something like this when it comes to who is having sex with whom in this book.  No, I mean the word “literally” literally.  It’s almost as if author Larry McMurtry set a personal goal to break a world’s record of how many times all of his different characters can all have sex with everyone else.  I just found myself shaking my head at the constant incredulity.

There are other areas of this book that are beyond stupid that don’t serve any purpose but to fill up page space.  Those events definitely weren’t necessary since this thing was already over 500 pages, but for some reason, the author insists on bloating the overly obnoxious story.  There’s one scene where the Governor of Texas tries to attend the celebration by helicopter that goes nowhere.  There’s also a scene where Duane and wife Karla (I say ‘wife’ in the loosest term possible) drive to Dallas to see a psychiatrist.  The whole chapter was completely idiotic and pointless.

Speaking of Karla, it should also be mentioned that everyone’s “favorite” of “The Last Picture Show” was the sultry young Jacy.  She arrives back in town (of course she does) after a brief career as an Italian actress, and she in Karla began to have a somewhat strange friendship.  How Duane never kills these two is beyond me.

This book was by far the worst novel by Larry McMurtry I’ve ever read. He can do comedy quite well; I would recommend his Berrybender tetralogy.  This one, though, was not good at all.  The lens through how I envisioned this story was so clouded, though, I can’t help but wonder if I was just looking at the story in a completely incorrect way. If you happened to have read this thing, I hope you enjoy it more than I did.

Precipice

 

Precipice – Robert Harris

If we’re honest, when we fall in love - I mean hard in love – we tend to do stupid things.  Something about romantic obsession with another human being makes our brains turn to mush and we can unintentionally behave in ways that are awfully embarrassing for everybody to see.  Many times we can’t sleep, we can’t eat, we can’t even think clearly.  Sometimes I think that my GPA back in college could have been an entire point higher had I not been so romantically stupid during certain points in my youth. But I really don’t want to even go there.

Oh well. At least I wasn’t the Prime Minister of England going through such feelings at the outbreak of World War I.  Yes, author Robert Harris suggests that this just may have been the case.  The Prime Minister in 1914 was Henry Asquith.  He was about 60, married, yet he fell for a woman less than half his age. For a while, the feelings were reciprocal. Her name was Venetia Stanley and came from a family with gobs of money, so she was part of the aristocracy.

In “real life”, we actually have the surviving correspondence from the Prime Minister.  The author imagines what the other half was writing, and we have a bizarre improper love story on our hands.

The problem, as I’ve alluded to, is that the year is 1914, and the country of England is on the brink of entering the War to End All Wars.  With such an event on the horizon, the powers that be need to have a clear head.  Not so with Asquith. He’s completely loopy in love, and can’t seem to function with any level of normalcy when his country needs him the most.  This was the saddest, yet most intriguing part of this novel.  To be honest, not much really happened in the “action” department, but the reward for the reader is seeing this improbable relationship, and just how smitten and brain warped the PM actually was.

As we should expect with a 26-year-old having an adulterous affair with a man more than twice her age, she eventually loses interest somewhat.  I mean, there is a war going on, and even though she’s part of the elite aristocracy, she wants to prove herself and be useful, electing to go in the much-needed field of nursing.  Asquith can’t understand such nonsense.  Can’t she just stay at home and wait for the rare occurrences when he can sneak away and have a quick fling?

The story is told through the eyes of a (fictitious) detective, Paul Deemer.  Deemer has his own typical issues, and in many ways, this is his story as much as the two tabloid subjects.  The problem (one of many) when you’re so highly infatuated as the Prime Minister, is that you just might accidentally divulge state secrets to your lover. Not a good idea considering the times. And not a good idea when a detective stumbles across a lot of what is going on.

Another thing I enjoyed about this book is that it served as a decent primer to how and why the first World War started, and why England had to get involved.  It was quite the sad tale since hindsight tell us just how horrible the conflict would be after four years of what was essentially a grueling stalemate.  If one doesn’t particularly like the romantic story presented here, they may enjoy the book for its history.

Robert Harris is quietly becoming one of my favorite authors. Any author who writes well on the subject of history is going to be favorable in my book, and apart from his wonderful “what-if” debut Fatherland, his novels have been rich with history; some imagined but rich with emotion and detail.  I would recommend this book along with the others of his that I have read. As of this writing, I’m committing myself to try to read his complete works.  Will I continue to enjoy these thrillers?  We’ll see.