Mark Manson imagines how to restore old-fashioned virtues

Humans need hope. Manson appeals to readers to develop "a sustainable, benevolent hope" that unites rather than dividing us, that is "robust and powerful, yet still grounded in reason and reality." Only this can carry us through life "with a sense of gratitude and satisfaction."

In this remarkable work, Manson shows how current social values and expectations weaken us. He speaks of values that are now unfashionable: emotional maturity, character, and virtue. He also encourages us to face up to where we are and how we've got here.

Individual choices, choosing challenging commitments and taking responsibility for them -- these are the actions of mature adults, and the only path to "spiritual happiness." They also make us "anti-fragile," able to stand up to life.

Daily decisions have long-term consequences, and choice is a serious business. This important activity should not be confused with selecting among the overabundance and variety of consumer goods available today. In reality, these are distractions. The plethora of meaningless purchasing options steals our attention from the truly important things.

Human conflict is always with us, both within and without. The author notes that in the paradox of progress, "an irrational sense of hopelessness is spreading across the rich, developed world...The better things get, the more anxious and desperate we all seem to feel." Yet we all have the power of choice. How we cope with this as individuals will have great influence on the future pf spcoetu. 

I was surprised by the concluding section of the book, which lays out Manson's thoughts on how to pass through human crisis into a "post-hope" world. There is much to recognize here, and whether a reader resonates with the final section or not, this is definitely a worthy read.

American by Day and the paradox of individualism

This novel portrays Sigrid, a female Norwegian police officer who featured in Norwegian by Night. Learning her brother is missing in America, she goes looking and meets Irv, an American sheriff who studied divinity rather than criminology. Wary at first, the two cops develop enough mutual trust to tackle the problem they share, though it has different implications for each of them. Sigrid fears for the safety of her brother Marcus, who has run like a guilty fugitive from the scene where his lover dropped to her death from a high building. In Irv's world, the professor's death raises the American spectre of race relations.

At a tense confrontation in from of a biker bar by a Target parking lot, Sigrid recalls how Norwegian gangs "adopted American tropes about freedom, individuality, and rebellion and demanded complete conformity to them."

According to academic race relations expert Lydia Jones, the paradox of American cultural individualism is "both the problem and the solution." She explains that "'What we're up against now is a conservative movement anchored in a way of seeing Americanness that says that any attention to group problems, or trying to actively support diversity through representation is actually divisive and discriminatory itself...They see the entire world through this individualism prism," which "negates discussions of race and racism...One can't escape the observation that America historically enslaves groups, but only frees individuals.'"

Marcus, also a teacher, makes similar observations about the students who are plugged in to their phones, thinking "the more they strive to express their uniqueness in those machines, the more conformist they become."

Miller's language is smart and funny, which makes it easy to absorb unpalatable truths. We laugh when Irv explains that "nobody has ever overestimated the intellect of a man in cowboy boots," which is why he wears them. We like him better for  having left his job using his "knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew to help name pharmaceutical products," when he realized that "most of the products aren't meant to cure you but make you dependent on the treatment." That felt wrong.

Sigrid's perspective on American policing is fact-based and clear. Citing a recent article, she tells Irv, "While we don't know how many citizens are killed by the police, we do know how many cops have been killed by criminals...the overall number of murdered officers has been dropping in a nice flattening curve since the 1970s." The perceived "war on the police" is illusory; there's been nothing close to that since Prohibition in the 1920s.

This book features variable and shifting perspectives, shown mostly using Sigrid's point of view. "Why," she wonders idly as she flips through the TV channels in a motel room, "is overacting preferred in situation comedies but not in dramas?" In a more serious moment, she decides that "The heart is one of the few places where facts and truth may be separable." Shopping in Target provides a salutary reminder of privilege: the low prices make her feel "a momentary pang of guilt for the abducted and enslaved children who surely weaved the clothing with their tiny little fingers." She finds it "unsettling how quickly that feeling fades as she "holds up a pair of ...jeans being sold...for twelve dollars, the price of coffee and a muffin in Oslo." And as Sigrid tells Irv, there are no glass barriers between the front and rear seats of Norwegian cruisers; it's unheard-of for Norwegian criminals to shoot police.

She also feels that American horror movies reflect the culture: the invariably end "with someone being self-reliant and overcoming her own fear or else failing to do that and dying." Unable to think of a single movie "where the horror was overcome through strategy, cooperation, teamwork, or planning," she reflects to Irv that "the terrible machine you've created," explains "why Americans buy guns rather than build institutions," which does not make anyone safer.

The differing perspectives of the sexes comes up for some gentle ribbing too. The SWAT team scenes feature hilariously clownish portrayals of trigger-happy macho males, whose hasty and ill-considered actions incite in Sigrid a flash of anger against men, for "their stupidity, their lies, their egotism, their irrelevant words, their aggressive personalities and their hairy backs...the ease by which they open jars and their inexplicable incapacity to return even the smallest object" to its rightful location. However, knowing that she cares deeply about her brother and respects her male colleague, the reader can smile at her snit as she slogs through the forest ruining her good Italian shoes.

Strangely, just after reading this novel, I learned another piece of the American cultural puzzle from a recently published essay. For American citizens, no matter where they live, work and earn, that there is no escape from filing taxes in the US, and failure to comply can carry heavy financial penalties. Paradoxically, I was gobsmacked to learn that it costs $2350 to relinquish one's US citizenship - a costly sanction against no longer wanting to be American.

In a recent essay, Mark Manson takes the concept of paradox beyond culture into the realm of human biology. We need to maintain homeostasis, a salubrious balance between opposites. This concept, he says, also has applications in psychology, for instance, as we are obliged to seek company, then retreat into ourselves, or cycle between seeking novelty and maintaining a reassuring routine.

Humans are contradictory and paradoxical, and our behaviour is often unaccountable. Reading fiction is a good way to face the irrationality of our views and actions. The work of Derek B. Miller is enlightening and thought-provoking as well as entertaining. While he admits that as a novelist, he takes "some liberties with reality," he deserves kudos for showing us realities we all face, thus expanding our perspective on the human condition.

Josephine Tey returns as a character drawn by Nicola Upson

Born in Inverness in 1896, Josephine Tey entered the world as Elizabeth Mackintosh. After a brief career as a physical education teacher, she turned to writing. As Gordon Daviot, she wrote plays for the London theatre, most notably, Richard of Bordeaux. Staged in 1933, this drama put her in the spotlight and catapulted John Gielgud to stardom.

Josephine Tey was the name under which "Bess" penned her mystery novels. These featured an entirely new sort of detective, Alan Grant. Tey's work broadened the mystery genre "opening doors," as Val McDermid puts it, "for others to walk through." Tey died in 1952, but Nicola Upson revived her, publishing the first of her Josephine Tey Mystery series in 2008. Set in the theatre world of thirties London, it features the novelist as a character.

The Josephine Tey character admits to writing her first mystery novel on a bet and dedicating it to her typewriter. She also uses some qualities of her policeman friend Inspector Penrose as a model for her dapper fictional detective, Alan Grant. Novelist Upson works in a cameo of the redoubtable and very real forensic pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury. The Guardian has dubbed him "the highly controversial founder of crime scene investigation (CSI) in Britain."

Intricately plotted and written in a similar style to Tey's well-known contemporary mystery writers of the time, Upson's first Josephine Tey Mystery also delves deep into its characters and expresses universal themes, portraying in particular, the damage done by war -- not only to those who fight it, but to the generations that follow.

The practice of blogging: a decade of evolution

Ten years ago today, I started blogging. With only the haziest understanding of the medium, I posted Not the Naughties, an essay I'd already written and polished. Unsure how to proceed, I sought advice and found plenty of it. Be the expert on a single topic! Monetize your blog! Establish it as part of your platform! When none of that resonated, I continued to go my own way, writing for the joy of it, and editing past posts that came up in my stats.

Soon I was using the blog to schedule posts and meet deadlines. I'd sketch them in roughly, then finish and and edit them before and after they went live. Soon I began to schedule posts in series, on a single topic. Meanwhile, having decided pictures were essential for this kind of short entry, I'd begun taking photos with future blog posts in mind. My new iphone had a great camera, and I used it to illustrate my posts.

Back then, I worked exclusively on a desktop computer -- writing about anything that inspired words. I kept a notebook in the car, one in my purse, and one by my bed. When an idea struck, I'd scribble a note, then develop a post later.

The first entry I posted while away from my home computer was inspired by my reaction to a novel by Khaled Hosseini. As soon I finished the book (in a very long queue at Heathrow Airport), I felt compelled to write down the thoughts that were tumbling around in my head. Settled in at the Penn Club, I lined up to use the single shared computer the hostelry had recently installed beside the clunky old pay phone. The next time I checked in to my London Club, I had my laptop.

Since that early post about Hosseini's book, I've posted 548 other commentaries on books. I follow no rules, but use my current reading obsessions to comment on books that spark a special resonance. Some of these have been published decades before, and some express the voices of wonderful new writers who keep me on the reading edge.

Looking back at my stats, I note the posts that got the most hits. In 2013, following a visit to Lethbridge, my post about Ammolite garnered 4500 views. A post on Chauvet cave in France (2011) was seen over 3500 times, and one on the late and wonderful writer Richard Wagamese (2013) got 2000 views, and continues to get hits today. The next most popular was one about a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. What am I to make of this? I used to wonder, but now I just use my energy to write and edit, keeping in tune with a practice that hones my skills and soothes me.

Transcription by Kate Atkinson is both chilling and hilarious

London, 1940. Juliet Armstrong has a boring clerical job in "the Registry" at Wormwood Scrubs, hq of a burgeoning MI5. One day she's approached by Perry Gibbons, who introduces himself, saying "I need a girl, I'm afraid."

"Well...I am a girl, I suppose." This response reflects the author's trademark sheen of humour; Juliet's  thoughts sharpen the comic tone. Impressed by his "firm voice, a nice low register that spoke of both kindness and unassailable authority in a man," she agrees to work for him. Not that she has much choice -- as her friend Clarissa puts it, after a desultory interview, "I think you've been plucked." And so Juliet becomes joins a special operation and becomes a kind of clerical spy, transcribing the words of a group of fifth columnists who meet in the next door apartment to the operation's "office" in Dolphin Square.

Kate Atkinson conveys both characters and setting with devastating wit and power. Readers acquire insight into Juliet from her idle thoughts about word meanings and rhymes, and laugh when she learns that someone's husband is an actuary and wonders what that is, then decides it sounds "as if it belonged in a zoo, along with a cassowary and a dromedary." Learning that "Juliet and Hartley had long since abandoned manners with each other," and find it "refreshing to behave without respect towards someone," the reader absorbs a wealth of information about the social rules of the time. Then there is Juliet's touching but innocent hope that her boss might kiss her -- before she eventually clues in to the fact that he is gay.

Sometimes the comedy takes on a darker hue, as with the sketch of the pilot Juliet had "briefly dated" during the war. When he lost a leg in a crash landing returning from a raid, "He made light of it, joked about it endlessly from his hospital bed (Not a leg to stand on, Pull the other one, and so on)." In the same sentence, we learn that "it ruined him and he gassed himself in his mother's kitchen after he was released from hospital," making Juliet "furious." Convinced that she would have stood by the one-legged pilot, she thinks of her other past lovers as "mistakes."

Long after the war Juliet is working for the BBC when she receives a threatening note saying she will pay for what she did. "Must I?" she wonders, sensing the "clumsily stitched wound" of her war service opening up again, and thinking the war "had thrown up plenty of unpaid debts -- why should she be the one being presented with the bill?" She also wonders who "is going to be next to pop out of the box" that is supposed to keep her past contained.

Astutely, she senses "some kind of osmotic membrane between the Corporation and the Service, employees moving from one world to the other without hindrance...Sometimes you had to wonder if MI5 was using the BBC for its own purposes. Or indeed, if it was the other way round." She also feels there is a "quasi-religious tone to the Corporation. Broadcasting House itself was dedicated to 'Almighty God,' as if [he] was looking down benevolently on the transmitters from the clouds," and wonders if that too is a front.

The reader gets a clear sense of Juliet's character through her conversations with other as well as herself. When she and a doleful Prendergast discuss "isms," Juliet considers these: fascism, communism, and capitalism, and comments "We lose sight of the ideal that propelled them and yet millions die in defence of -- or attack on -- those beliefs." As well as being a clear thinker, Juliet has a high level of self-awareness, as when she observes herself feeling "slighted yet relieved," and thinks it "curious how you could hold two quite opposing feelings at the same time, an unsettling emotional discord."

The plot of the story hinges on this: who is using whom for what? Who is one of them and who one of us? In a moment that combines horror and hilarity, Juliet finds herself in the Brompton Oratory with the dog of an absent spy, trying to keep out of sight of someone she thinks is "one of us." Yet he has just mysteriously handed something over to "the man in the astrakhan-collared coat," whom she has seen on a few occasions, and suspects may be "one of them." Obliged to hold the dog firmly and duck down twice to avoid being seen, she begins to feel "almost religious."

It's all very complicated. As Juliet concludes, people disappear from history, not by being erased, but by being "explained away."

Geraldton War Memorial in Western Australia

This war memorial comemmorates the 745 sailors lost when the HMAS Sydney was sunk off Shark Bay during WWII.

The dome is comprised of gulls, and rests on seven pillars that represent the seven states of Australia. In the memorial garden, a bronze statue of a woman keeps watch over the pool below, symbolizing the women who watch and wait in wartime. Here visitors can visit and contemplate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Remembering our shared past: a ride through the jungle on an Army Duck

The amphibious Army Duck gave a group of tourists a ride through the jungle at Kuranda in Australia's tropical Northern Territory. We bumped along a rutted track, looking at basket ferns, blueberry ginger, and some of the many poisonous plants that grow in the world's oldest rainforest. The vehicle became a boat and we travelled through muddy brown waters before emerging onto a rough track.

Like many other human inventions that we use daily and with less awareness of their history, this vehicle was devised for use in war.

Remembering our past: Trinity Beach, Australia in WWII

To visit this out-of-the-way beach, we got a car from Cairns. The brisk wind was blowing roiled the sand, making the blue water look brown. After a pleasant interval lying on the soft sand sunning ourselves, we shared a meal in a nearly deserted beachside restaurant. Strolling on the beach afterwards, we read signs detailing the history of this place in WWII. With the Japanese in control of nearby Papua New Guinea, this became a site where Allied men practiced the skills of amphibious warfare. The current threats are stingrays and crocodiles.

Remembering our past: Potshot Memorial, Western Australia

Standing opposite the RAAF's Learmonth airport, this memorial seems to be in the middle of nowhere. But during WWII, this place was a submarine base and a refueling facility. The Australian armed forces ran anti-aircraft guns, radio and radar stations, and provided fighter cover for submarines. The Allies devised Operation Jaywick in 1942. Disguised as a fishing boat, a ship left Exmouth Gulf for Japanese-controlled Singapore. The crew attached limpet mines to Japanese ships, blowing up seven of them.

The raiders returned safely to Potshot without being found out, and the disguised boat was used for a second operation. In 1943, Japan bombed the Potshot base. In 1945 a cyclone damaged the facilities and they were subsequently closed.

Brother Kemal by Jakob Arjuni

When a wealthy woman hires Kemal Kayankaya to find her missing daughter, the private detective quickly gets the girl away from the clutches of a notorious pimp. However, to get her home safely means walking away from a bit of a mess. Meanwhile, he accepts a job as a bodyguard for a Tunisian author during the Frankfurt Book Fair. Aware that "the risk of dying in an attack involving explosives is a hundred times less than the risk of choking on a mini-mozzarella," Kemal doesn't take the publisher's talk of threats too seriously. He assumes the bodyguard is being provided "for promotional purposes."

Raised in Gemany, the orphaned Kemal has learned no Turkish. Yet in multicultural Frankfurt, even dealing with his French client and her Dutch husband, he can't escape being stereotyped.

This is a book where people wear masks and nothing is what it seems. Watching the transparently phony act of his client Valerie, Kemal concludes that she herself "no longer knew what she did unintentionally and what was a calculation or a trick."

All around him, values are upended. When Octavian, his policeman friend, confides that he knows "a great many people who prefer to save their own skin over the punishment of a criminal," Kemal tells him he's '"been in the Vice Squad too long," adding, "It's bad for your morals."' In fact, the cop is aware of an informer in his own ranks passing information to a known criminal, but puts off disturbing "the pyramid of police power" as his "promotion is due in a few weeks."

Nothing is as it seems. Kemal suspects a devout sheikh of resorting to kidnapping and threats to protect his nephew, a pimp who sells heroin. Receiving a strange phone call from this man, the "Turk" does not respond as expected to the sheik's "heavy hints and impenetrable remarks," but tells him to quit beating about the bush and get to the point. Convinced that Kemal Kayankaya is a Muslim name, the sheik later gives him a Koran.

Only with Kemal's wife Deborah can the reader relax into knowing that what we see is what we get. Her character is the classic uncomplicated ex-tart with a heart of gold.

In contrast to its red cover, the genre of the novel tends toward the noir, leavened by touches of sharp humour. This topsy turvy detective story by the talented Jakob Arjouni is a wild ride, full of ironic twists expressed in deliciously skillful language. This talented writer hit the ground running, winning a prize for his first novel, published at age 18. He died aged 49 in 2013, the year this final Kayankaya novel was published.

Water: Barlow's work for water inspires communities to go blue, one at a time

At the Whistler Writers conference last week, Maude Barlow spoke with host Bill Richardson and novelist Omar el Akkad about the world's water. Barlow is one of those leading the charge against the increasingly corporate control of water. Her leadership and work were instrumental in persuading the UN to declare it a basic human right in 2010.

Nestle's 2017 annual bottled sales were $8 billion. It operates in 34 countries and owns 49 brands of bottled water, including Perrier. Vittel provides one example of the results. While Nestle pumps out a million litres a day, the local water table continues to drop. Similar water grabs are taking place in Ethiopia, Pakistan, Tasmania, Calfornia. The list goes on. While "Fiji water" is bottled in imported plastic bottles from China, Fijians lack safe water to drink.

"If placed end to end, the number of single-use plastic bottles now sold each year would extend more than halfway to the sun," Barlow tells us. 91% of these DO NOT get recycled. Nestle now owns the water park in the Brazilian spa town Sao Lourenco. In 2018, due to over-extraction and the resulting bacterial contamination, the nation's health authority banned the sale of water from that plant. In the face of protests by local women whose water supply is being drained away, Nestle still uses its "rights," permitting another company to extract water from the same well.

In another South American country, a private company claimed ownership of falling rain, and tried to forbid people to capture it. Writing at UVIC in 2014, Katie Duke pointed out in a research article that in BC, "the legality of collecting rainwater is uncertain." As US droughts increase, the issue of who "owns" the rain has come under discussion there as well.

Revealing the power of economics on government, Barlow shares the related shocking fact that "a 2016 study of the 100 top economies in the world, 69 were corporations, up from 63 the previous year." According to Global Justice Now, "the ten biggest corporations, including Walmart, Apple and Shell, make more money than most of the countries of the world combined," and "Walmart is bigger than Spain, Australia and the Netherlands."

Yet there is hope. While senior governments fail to act, continuing to support free trade agreements that define water as a saleable commodity, Blue Communities are stepping up. This movement began in 2009 in response to policies of the Harper Conservative government then in power. From Canada, where 27 municipalities joined the movement, the concept spread to cities in Europe and South America, then to institutions including universities, unions and faith-based organizations. Since the 2019 publication of Barlow's book, Victoria, Montreal and Los Angeles are among the cities that have declared themselves Blue.

In line with the 2010 UN resolution that declares water and sanitation fundamental human rights, each "Blue Community promises to protect water as a public trust," and to ensure that decisions about access to water and sanitation are made by "people and their elected officials, not by a for-profit investor." Where clean sources of water are available, Blue Communities also promises to phase out bottled water and to promote municipal tap water as safe and reliable sources.

Working toward universal access to clean water involves many other changes. By taking back control of water from corporations, individuals and communities cannot help but lighten the human footprint on our earthly home. Water is life. Rather than following the current flood of vicious propaganda that encourages shaming, blaming and tribal bunkerism, we need to come together over basic human issues that concern us all. The lesson for the 21st century is simple. As a human race, we are one. It's time to start acting that way. Promoting Blue Communities is one manageable way to begin.

Australian lore, bush tucker, and digeridoo music

The chef was Capes, an aboriginal man we met at Monkey Mia. A dozen tourists from England, Scotland, Canada and Australia followed him into the bush, where he threw a broken branch of acacia onto a fire he'd built earlier. For the promised bush tucker, he spread the coals with a stick and laid out two whole mullets, turning them by the tail with his bare hands at the right moment. When they were done, he deftly flipped them open on a branch of dry wattle. Cooked to perfection, the moist white meat was soon cool enough to eat with our fingers.

In the deepening darkness, our host pointed up at the Southern Cross, called by his people the emu in the sky. For them, the seasonal changes in the constellations - seen in the shifting position of the emu - revealed the right time to harvest the huge bird's eggs.

Another cultural lesson involved the importance of kinship. Capes, he told us, was a nickname; his real name was much longer, and saying it in full meant naming several forebears. For small groups of semi-nomadic people, awareness of kinship and clan designations enabled rules that prevented marriages between people who were too closely related.

At last it was time to play music. The women got clapsticks, while the men and boys were given the chance to try playing the digeridoo. Capes explained how the instrument is made demonstrated how to play it. Then the two young boys and the men in the group had a go. Easier said than done, the men acknowledged, but the boys began to pick up the technique.

Great Barrier Reef unlike a breakwater or garden wall

Far from being a barrier, the world's most famous reef is an enormous ecosystem comprised of living coral. The aerial view reveals its overall nature best.

Approached by boat, the reef is visible first as islets with waves breaking against them. Seen from below the waterline, the variety of coral of every conceivable shape and size is part of a teeming city of sea life, including enormous schools of fish. Below left, tiny fish swim along a sandy highway between coral cliffs.

  

Convict creations preserved in Perth

Government House, built for the governors largely by convict labour, was first occupied in 1863. Below left is the convict-built Barracks Arch, the last remains of the home built for the Pensioner Force who came out as guards on the ships that carried the convicts. Not far from Fremantle Prison, these warehouses stand as reminders of Australia's past history as a destination for criminals "transported" from England. Often the crime was being so poor they had to steal food, as poignantly portrayed in "The Fields of Athenry."

 

Tall glass towers reduce world's cities to a bland similarity

Left: Opposite Sydney's Central Train Station, these generic giants show their Australian identity only by the odd flower growing bravely between them -- a Gymea lily. Looming over the unique beauty of the Opera House and the historic Sydney Harbour bridge (below), enormous new buildings blot out the older sites around Circular Quay. The same trend holds in Perth and Melbourne, Toronto and Vancouver, Beijing and Shanghai. Along with the politically embarrassing statues now being torn down, the unique history of the world's varied cities is steadily being erased. Apparently in service of capitalism.

A well-travelled Boab tree

Now growing happily in King's Park, this boab tree, called Gija Jumulu for the Gija people, has not always lived in Perth, Australia. Ten years ago, it made a journey of 32,000 km from the East Kimberly, dropping two tons of water on the way. About 750 years old, it could double that age. Uprooted to make way for roadbuilders, this venerable tree is now cared for by arborists, and attracts many visitors to the botancial gardens.

The giant boab tree is the source of one of Ian White's Australian Bush Flower Essences. Boab essence sweeps out the energy of prejudice and negative family patterns, clearing the way for healthier and more positive habits of thought.

The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

Young and well-educated, Officer Sean Duffy works among mature provincial colleagues for the Carrickfergus police in Northern Ireland. It's 1981, and Belfast is burning. The lone "Catholic" in a station of "Proddies" (though the cops are not religious), Sean observes the false categories and black and white thinking as his station is challenged with a rash of apparent anti-gay killings and a seeming suicide.

The funeral of Bobby Sands is over. With other hunger strikers dying in the Maze, an obdurate Thatcher cuts short a Belfast visit, reiterating her refusal to "negotiate with terrorists." Meanwhile, strict social divisions are enforced by threats and violence: Catholic or Protestant, Orange or Green, from here or from "over the water." Like Anna Burns in Milkman, McKinty uses such chillingly simple phrases to telegraph extreme social tensions.

Sean Duffy wants only to solve certain crimes and prove himself. He senses the first three deaths are connected -- to each other and to the political situation. True, homosexuality is illegal, and gays are pariahs, but he reasons ironically that Northern Ireland "doesn't do hate crimes." Anyone who wants to kill, he tells his colleagues, just joins one of the paramilitary organizations.

Along with the two murdered gay men, a young woman was found hanged, an apparent suicide. But the pathology report is ambiguous, and also reveals that she recently gave birth. She's the divorced ex of a long-jailed IRA operative. For Sean, her death smacks of political revenge rather than the standard Irish trope of guilt and depression caused by having an "illegitimate" baby.

In this tale of twists and turns, the first of the Troubles Trilogy, the author portrays his setting with an unerring voice. As well as capturing a unique time and place, this novel raises universal social questions along with tension-building story questions. Fortunately, the fascinating but deeply flawed Sean Duffy returns in future works, where the reader can see what he's learned from his first foray into Carrickfergus policing.

I found this novel far more convincing and thought-provoking than Adrian McKinty's more recent work, The Chain. I look forward to reading the sequels to follow Sean's development as a character trying to survive in a bizarrely challenging place and moment in history.

The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan

I was up till 3:30 finishing this novel. The title says a lot. A bilingual triple entendre, the word ruin has a couple of meanings in Irish, as the author explains in a note. It can mean a secret, a hidden thing, but has also long been used as a term of endearment. All three meanings are evoked in this tale of tragedy and secrets and distrust. Author Dervla McTiernan handles harsh material well, portraying the bureaucratic and personal dysfunction in police and social services, as well as the desperately hard lives of children who are or should be taken into care.

Jack's apparent suicide is really a murder: he's caught witnessing a nefarious deed. On the face of it, what ties the dead man to his killer seems to be pure chance. But the killer was also a foster child -- one whose reaction to early trauma is utterly different from Jack's.

Queensland's Green Island strewn with bits of coral

Green Island lies off the Cairns coast near the Great Barrier Reef. A cay is a large sandpile that protrudes above the sea to become an island, and eventually growing vegetation. The water is pristine, the sand sugar soft and littered with bits of coral from the nearby reef.
 

The Dry by Jane Harper

This debut mystery by Jane Harper introduces a city police officer with a rural past. When the story opens, Aaron Falk is back in his home town of Kiewarra for the funeral of someone who was once a close friend. Yet all he wants is to get away from the people he grew up with, both the nasty bullies and those who were kind. In a few short hours, he hopes to start the drive back to the office in Melbourne.

In many ways, the town is much as he remembers, but with one important difference. The river is dry. The lack of rain has frayed the nerves of the townspeople, who are also now reeling from the shock of having to bury an entire family. As the story unfolds, we intuit the reason for Aaron's sudden departure, and why he's never been back. We also meet a local woman he knew as a teen, now a single mother, and learn of a teenage friend who drowned.

This novel dramatizes the power of weather. Drought puts psychological as well as financial pressure on those whose livelihoods it threatens. The story also portrays the damage caused by fear and lies, suspicion and distrust, when compounded by small-town pressures to conform.

The book is available locally, but I bought my copy on a recent trip to Australia. Until I witnessed it with my own eyes, I was unfamiliar with the concept of rivers empty of water. After crossing many bridges over dry riverbeds, I gained some sense of Australian weather and seasons. The Dry can hit around the country, when the rivers are not overflowing their banks. In the Northern Territory, the Build-up is the name of the humid and uncomfortable season of waiting for the Wet.

Jane Harper's memorable federal policeman Aaron Kirk returns in future novels, and The Dry has been made into a film, starring Eric Bana as Kirk. Filmed in several Australian locations, the movie is still in the editing process.

Empty rivers in Australia

I took this photo from a highway bridge over the Gascoyne. The longest river in Western Australia  abuts farms and orchards. In late August, it was completely dry. For the past two years, much of Australia has been suffering from drought. Driving north, we crossed many more bridges over dry rivers; some, like the Ashburton, below, had bits of water in them.

As road signs suggest, rivers spill over in the wet season. In 2010-11, the Gascoyne rose and inundated a vast area. Government estimated soil erosion as about 9 million tonnes.

North Pacific South Pacific

In the Southern hemisphere, even the sky looks different. Its unfamiliar constellations are dominated by the Southern Cross.

White Rock on a September evening conveyed a very different mood from what we saw two evenings ago at Surfer's Paradise. After a month in Australia, the North Pacific looks chilly and grey. Queensland's Gold Coast (below) is on the cusp of summer.

Cloth of gold - pretty, tiny and very dangerous

Travelling in Australia, my daughter and I visited a small cay called Green Island enroute to the Great Barrier Reef. On the sandy beach, I picked up some bits of coral and tiny shells and and put them in Yasemin's hand.

At once, she identified the conical shell on the left. "A cloth of gold."

"Do you remember playing with Alvina's shell collection when you were little?"

"Of course. And that one nearly killed her."

True History of the Kelly Gang

According to a Sydney tour guide, a fifth of Australians are descended from convicts who arrived from England in the 19th century. Thefts of food often led to "transportation," and being Irish didn't help. This history helps explain the pride in convict ancestry today, and makes sense of the the folk hero status achieved by the bush ranger Ned Kelly, who was hanged in Melbourne Gaol in 1880, aged 26.

Peter Carey's novel about this revolutionary outlaw affords fascinating insights into colonial Australia. The novelist has researched contemporary writings by and about the real Ned Kelly to create the voice that describes "a colony made specifically to have poor men bow down to their gaolers." The fictionalized Kelly also describes his relatives as "Irish and therefore drunk with land and horses, all the old hardships soon to be forgotten."

As the story unfolds, new hardships pile up around him. With his twice-jailed father dead, twelve-year-old Ned tries hard to be be the man and protect the family. Living in a settler's hut where "the smallest flutter of a mother's eyelids are like a tin sheet rattling in the wind," he feels angry and powerless when she takes up with the outlaw Harry Power.

Looking back on his earlier self years later, Ned feels "great pity for the boy who readily believed the barefaced lie" designed to manipulate him into abetting Harry's crimes. Recalling his earlier naivete, he remembers the Harry's eyes "alive with emotion I mistook for sympathy."

Early in the book, Ned Kelly is portrayed as a sensitive and intelligent boy born into deep poverty and a troubled family and community. He saves another child from drowning without thought of danger to himself, and later, works to save his mother's land. Sadly, his honest efforts to raise and trade in cattle and horses avail him nothing. His decision to turn against the law is a conscious one, taken after many incidences of unfair accusations at the hands of the police.

Meanwhile, the new colony is poisoned by ancient tribal roles and enmities. Superstition persists, with the banshee "thriving like blackberry in the new climate." Old feuds are passed on to new generations: British against Irish, cousin against cousin, police against settlers, and "wild colonial boys" holding up trains, coaches and banks. Forced to fight another bush ranger, Ned wins, only to discover that he is now popular, which is "even worse than being hated as a traitor" although the conditions are much the same -- "every drunken fool" wants to fight him. Kelly also sympathizes with the misfit Steve Hart, whose father "filled his head with all them rebel stories."

Ned also understands "the agony of the Great Transportation that our parents would rather forget what come before so we currency lads is left alone ignorant as tadpoles spawned in puddles on the moon." He is cognizant of the sad truth that "poor people's love is cupboard love and all it took were £500 for the police to be led to the outlaw's secret door."

When his destitute mother is put in jail and her youngest baby taken, Ned resolves to get her out. The depth of the injustice around him results in a political awakening. In the doomed hope of staying on the right side of the law, he reports police corruption and misconduct to the powers that be, believing they will see justice done. The betrayal of this hope turns him into a revolutionary as well as an outlaw. Helping the disadvantaged gains him the admiration of a Robin Hood figure.

The voice Carey has created for Ned Kelly is rustic and untutored, nuanced and poetic. Reading this remarkable book is like hearing an actual voice from the past. In some respects, the history of the Kelly gang seems quaint and distant; at the same time, we see parallel conditions today. Tribalism, religious and ethnic prejudice, poverty and social disadvantage are still very much present in society, and they still lead to violence.

Below: Memorabilia of Ned Kelly are sold as souvenirs at Melbourne Gaol, now a museum.

 

Himself by Jess Kidd

When Mahony shows up in the village of Mulderrig, the publican notes that while he has "a sort of bearing about him," his trousers are "ridiculous...wide enough at the bottom to mop the main road."

Jack, the guard, invites the newcomer to sit by him. The cop, we're told, "works his stretch of the coast, sorting out the wicked, the misjudged and the maligned without once having to raise his voice."

But this village has dirty secrets, and to save his life, Mahony has to blow them wide open. He finds an ally in the ancient Mrs. Cauley. a long-ago star who once held sway on the the Abbey Theatre theatre in Dublin. The old lady now "lies in state" in the ruined library of her once-imposing house, which retains its "good bone structure," though the mice now have the run of the guest rooms."

The feisty old woman may have "teeth like a row of bombed houses," but she still notices that the newcomer is good-looking. In no time he's begun to charm her and she's judiciously spilling certain village gossip. When he leaves, her warning to her housekeeper Shauna not to "try it on" with him is only half in fun. Mrs. Cauley is not the only widow, but the other one is in mourning, and has been "since the death of de Valera."

This first novel has a large cast of characters, including the unappealing Father Quinn, whose confessional laps up "tales of suffering and spite," and "feeds on shame and remorse. Insincerely kind, the priest "pours the tea with spiteful servitude" for a parishioner he can't bully. Bridget, "who came with the parochial house, is the first to admit that she isn't a patch on her late mammy in the housekeeping department." Though her skill set includes wiring houses, castrating bulls, and drinking the publican under the table, she "holds no truck with the relentless drudgery of housework or the moral authority of Catholic priests." According to Mrs. Cauley, she's also "deep enough to make a well look shallow."

The dead pay visits too, though only Mahony and select others are able to see them. Moreover, even for those with the sight, the dead, "like cats -- don't always come when they're called."

Taking readers back in time, the author allows us to glimpse a possible fate for Mahony's lost mother. Did she really run away to Dublin in her "brand-new baby and her second-hand coat," only to hand the boy over to an orphanage? It seems unlikely that a loving mother would allow her son to be brought up in an orphanage where the "nuns have eyes in the backs of their habits." They "rub their relics if they want to put a saint on you. Then you're truly banjaxed."

Orla, the young unwed mother of Mahony, is well and truly banjaxed. When her parents fail horribly in their duty to care for their child, the father runs away, the mother blames the daughter and the priest blames both.

Early in the novel, we are shown the innocent but telling image of "the mammies inside getting the dinner and the daddies inside waiting to go out for a jar." As Kidd relentlessly unlocks the secrets of the villagers in a series of brief evocations, the reader wonders whether it will be possible for that initial innocence to return.

Meanwhile, with its "magical powers," a good pint can "heal surface wounds" and "cement minor friendships." Boys hot-wire cars, and women "sell black-market fireworks out of prams." At the Post Office and General Store, Marie Gaughan sells rat traps, knicker elastic, feather dusters, "water butts and garden hoses," as well as "banned books and jam made from hedgerows." On the day of the Village Festival, a theatrical evening, villagers fight over roles, "animals are sold...and marriages are brokered in the car park."

The characters are vivid, the themes weighty, and the plot complex and suspenseful. This reader derived equal joy from the vivid originality of the author's voice and language. As a Creative Writing student at St. Mary's University in London, author Jess Kidd wrote a thesis melding genres in crime fiction. In this novel, she's applied the techniques brilliantly.

Shanghai Redemption by Qiu Xiaolong

This mystery is wrapped not only in an enigma, but in carefully applied layers of literary reference, contemporary historical realism, and socio-cultural analysis.

After 15 years of walking a knife edge of Party sensitivities, Inspector Chen is suddenly stripped of his job as the Shanghai Police Bureau's Special Case Squad. He gets a new job title -- and title is the operative word. Chen and his colleagues in the precinct know this empty 'promotion' is no more than an effort to sideline one of his investigations. But which one, and why? The wily inspector still has his brain, his poetry and other resources. Obliged to shuttle back and forth on the high speed train between Shanghai and Suzhou, where he's having his father's gravestone renovated, Chen consults his gray cells as well as trusted friends of the utmost discretion to help him investigate.

Qiu Xiaolong is a master of irony and double entendre, as we observe in this layered description of a traditional hotel room in Suzhou. "On one wall, there was an impressive row of pictures showing high-ranking party leaders in the fifties and sixties, eloquently documenting the hotel’s glorious past. The wall opposite displayed a long rice-coloured silk scroll of a seventh-century Tang poem copied by a modern calligrapher."

He portrays the status of women in China under 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics.' Among Qiu's fascinating range of characters are a Suzhou opera singer, the discarded ernai, (non-status concubine), of a Party official, and Chen's friend and former colleague, Detective Yu. Yu's intrepid wife Peqin helps her husband's inquiries in places where he is unable to venture. We also meet Party members who subtly threaten Chen using anodyne phrases, as well as expensive lawyers and American accountants who maintain that they're not obliged to tell the police a thing.

The topsy-turvy world of contemporary Shanghai is an excellent setting for this satisfying mystery. The booming city is rife with corruption, new money, 'Red Princelings' and 'Big Bucks.' While having concubines and playing mahjong are nominally illegal, "every service you can imagine" is for sale in the Heavenly World night club. In such places, officials avoid internet exposure by entering unseen through hidden underground parking access. "Red songs" enjoy an ironic comeback, while 'naked officials' ship their families and money overseas and then stay back with their ernai to see how the political wind blows. 

Meanwhile, skyrocketing Shanghai real estate prices mean many in the city must bury their dead in nearby Suzhou. Thus, the annual Qingming observance leads to a cemetery visit rush hour for the new high-speed train system to cope with. 

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

Jackson Brodie is back. Now middle-aged, he sees himself as "a walking, talking history lesson...except that nobody is interested in learning anything from him." Deemed a Luddite by his twenty-something daughter, he regards his teenage son Nathan and remembers when he and his ex, Julia, created "the embryo that would one day sprawl its legs and fold its arms sarcastically."

When Nathan asks his dad for another ice cream, Jackson reflects that for this generation, "never enough" is "the dominant trait." They've been "bred to consume." Darkly, he predicts that capitalism will devour itself, "thereby fulfilling its raison d'etre in an act of self-destruction, aided by the dopamine feedback loop." Meanwhile, the insatiable Nathan and his fellow teens are "living sandwich boards, covered in free advertising for corporate evil."

Jackson remains "a friend to anarchy;" he still magnetizes hapless people who need rescuing. He sees bad things around him, and wishes he could fix them all. Remembering the twelve-year-old with a unicorn backpack he saw get into a car a couple of days ago, he still wonders. Is she safe at home, after being berated by loving parents for coming back late? "He hoped so, but his gut told him differently. In his (long) experience, your brain might mislead you, but your gut always told you the truth."

In spite of his determination to serve society and his intuitions about things that don't look right, Jackson still has time to think philosophical thoughts. Out jogging in a quiet wood, he ponders the Zen koan about whether a tree falling in the forest makes a noise if nobody is there to hear it. When he trips on a root and goes flying, he fancies he can "hear the sound of one hand clapping."

Jackson is not the only character to provide humour in this intricately plotted book. The grotesquely egotistical has-been comedian Barclay Jack gazes gloomily into the mirror before a show, confirming his fear that he looks his age. His spirits droop, and when his stomach also swoops within him, he wonders: "Stage fright? Or a dodgy curry?"

Another actress, Julia, comments laconically, "The class war's over. Everyone lost." Atkinson applies her legendary humour to description as well as plot and characters. Her evocation of a "modish" bar "so dark you could hardly see your drink in front of you," made me laugh out loud.

With inimitable sleight-of-hand, the author reinstates characters from Jackson's past books and ties them up in a contemporary mystery involving a "magic circle" of people in very high places. For far too long, they get away with trafficking girls. The twists and turns that eventually lead to their comeuppance make this a most satisfying tale.

Involuntary Witness by Gianrico Carofiglio

As a former prosecutor specializing in organized crime, novelist Gianrico Carofiglio has a unique perspective. He has also advised the anti-Mafia committee in the Italian parliament and served five years in the Italian senate.

Entering the world of the depressed, middle-aged lawyer Guido Guerrieri, we follow him through the law courts, bars, and beaches of Bari as he falls to the bottom of an emotional well, and join him as he slowly climbs out.

Ironically, it is the body of a child found down a real well that galvanizes Guerrieri. In a mysterious sequence of events, he is returned to life and purpose when he finds himself defending a Senegalese immigrant who is about to be convicted of the child's murder on the basis of wildly circumstantial evidence.

Through Guido's memories and reflections, the reader sees the numbing people he used to hang out with. Among this set, marriages of convenience, drinking, partying and meaningless affairs are commonplace. Some lawyers get paid in cash, give no receipts, declare improbably low incomes, and accept money they know has ties to organized crime. When Guido visits his client in prison, he is repelled by the routine unproven "violence committed on the prisoners to improve discipline."

After one successful court defence, we see Guido attacked on the street by thugs who disapprove. An amateur boxer, he's able to beat back the gangsters, only to have his tires slashed and his car damaged. To stop this escalating, he must work through a shady intermediary who visits Guido's attackers and returns with the message that if he does not report the damage to his car, but pays for it himself, the feud will end.

Though this novel is more noir than cosy, the narrator can be funny. Indeed, he places great value on a sense of humour, in particular, the ability to laugh at oneself. And speaking of noir, I haven't dyed the black-and-white cover red for effect. At this season, I mostly read outside; the colour is the result of the way our patio umbrella filters light.

Norwegian by Night, by Derek B. Miller

This brilliant novel by Derek B. Miller moves seamlessly from Oslo to Gramercy Park to the wars in Vietnam and the Balkans. Seen mostly through the eyes of an 82-year-old Jewish ex-Marine living in Norway, the story weaves in and out of conversations with people living and dead.

Sheldon may be feeling his age, possibly even suffering from the onset of dementia. His mind teems with thoughts and memories. A Vietnam vet, he carries a heavy burden of guilt and regret, even though he knows the deaths he feels worst about were dealt by the hands of fate and history.

When the aftermath of the Balkan wars arrives in Oslo, all hell breaks loose in the apartment of his granddaughter and grandson-in-law while they're out. Sheldon's military training kicks in, and he steps up to do what he can.

Miller's work is full of pithy lines that carry weighty ideas. "Only the educated stop to look for words -- having enough to occasionally misplace them." His characters' thoughts are also freighted with philosophy.

In a serious mood, Sheldon recalls how soldiers in Vietnam were imprinted with horrible smells. When ordered to approach a plane crash in case the pilot is still alive, the soldiers smell "fuel, which burned with a different odor than napalm, rice paddies, cattle and people." But burning fuel is "only a 2 on the gag-ometer" the soldiers have devised to classify the stenches that surround them; a 10 is reserved "for the smell of letters received from bureaucrats."

Looking back, Sheldon recalls that "It was not a grand moment" when he "watched as his son became a man." Without witnesses or heroics, Saul's "small gesture of dignity and respect between one man and another," opened "the possibility of a better world." Behind these simple words, we glimpse the vast and complex requirements demanded by society to satisfy honour among men.

The rules of honour also extend to ordinary life, causing Sheldon, in the presence of his young son, to shrug aside two bodyguards and punch out an anti-Semite who refuses to let him play golf at a country club. He is confident that the man will not complain to the police, reasoning that "The only thing worse for an anti-Semite than a Jew is being beaten up by a Jew." And therefore, "The fewer people who knew about it, the better."

Once father and son are safely away from the scene of the fight, Sheldon lectures Saul, saying 'This country is what you make it...you don't make excuses for America's bullshit. That's what the Nazis and commies do. The Fatherland. The Motherland. America isn't your parent. It's  your kid. And today I made America a place where you get your nose broken for telling a Jew he can't play a round of golf.' Sadly, in spite of its important lesson, this moment "that Saul would never forget... ruined the whole day."

Riding along the back roads of Norway on his motorcycle, Lars, the gentle modern Norwegian who still hunts animals, ponders the condition of being a Jew. He finds something unsettling about the way they speak as witnesses to history. "Since Egypt. Since the morning of Western civilization, when its light shone west from Jerusalem and Athens, and blanketed Rome and all that it would leave behind. They've watched the Western tribes and empires rise and fall--from the Babylonians to the Gauls, from the Moors to the Habsburgs to the Ottomans--and have alone remained. They have seen it all. And the rest of us wait for the verdict that is still, even now, to come."

Behind him on the bike, his wife Rhea wonders if her beloved grandfather really is succumbing to dementia. "Imagining what Sheldon would say in response to her doubts, she can't help but smile. 'Sanity is the thick soup of distraction we immerse ourselves in to keep from remembering that we're gonna bite it.'"

Sigrid, an Oslo police officer with her finger firmly on the pulse of the era, reflects that, "Recent immigration from Africa and Eastern Europe--and Muslim countries farther east--created a new social tension in the city that still lacked the political maturity to address it." With the liberals expounding "limitless tolerance," and the conservatives "racist or xenophobic," people "debate from philosophical positions but never from ones grounded in evidence, and so no sober consideration [is] being given to the very real question haunting Western civilization--namely, How tolerant should we be of intolerance?"

This novel portrays themes of deep resonance: guilt, regret, revenge, war and the cycle of violence; the pressures of history and the inescapable solitude of the self. Underpinning the stunning novels of Derek B. Miller is an impressive resume. Undoubtedly, his work with the UN, governments and think tanks, as well as his American - Swiss education and the fact that he lives in Norway add to the broad international perspective of his work.