Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday March 4, 2011
|
GONE
Mo Hayder
Atlantic Monthly
ISBN 978-0802119643
415 pages
$24
Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air," teaches literature at Georgetown University
The cover of Mo Hayder's latest novel, "Gone," shows the back of a little girl on a tricycle, pedaling off into the void. Not promising. Putting together the other available clues (the none-too-subtle title of the book, the plot summary on the book jacket), I deduced that this was yet another suspense story about vanished children. If it's possible for a subject to be, at once, horrifying and humdrum, this is the one.
Why this ongoing obsession in fiction with disappearing children? The subject is to contemporary literature what a maiden's loss of virginity was to the 18th-century novel -- a core cultural anxiety that informs plots high- and low-brow. So common is this nightmare that it's become somewhat threadbare -- which is why "Gone" didn't appeal, at first. But when I started reading, I discovered that the thing I was most dreading -- that hoary plot -- turned out to be the novel's greatest pleasure.
Maybe Hayder is also weary of this ubiquitous topic because in "Gone," she rings ingenious changes on it. Without giving too much away, I think it's permissible to say that by the end, the little girls who vanish throughout this tale turn out to be beribboned and pink-sneakered red herrings in a much more sinister game of retribution.
"Gone" is another entry in Hayder's series about the rough-hewn crew of police detectives who work in the Major Crime Investigation Unit of Bristol, England. At the opening of this story, Detective Inspector Jack Caffery has been summoned to an underground car park where, earlier that afternoon, a carjacking had taken place. A woman named Rose Bradley had been loading groceries into her Yaris when a man wearing a rubber Santa Claus mask ran down the entrance ramp of the garage. The assailant yanked Rose away from her car, grabbed the keys that were lying on the front seat and sped away. Apart from those scattered groceries, Rose's 11-year-old daughter, Martha, was in the backseat.
Caffery is acquainted firsthand with this particular horror: Thirty years earlier, his own brother was kidnapped, never to be seen again. Perhaps Caffery is, indeed, too close to the crime, because it's a colleague of his who makes the first crucial connection in the case. "Flea" Marley, the female director of Bristol's Underwater Search Unit (and a former romantic interest of Caffery's), pulls the dumbfounded detective aside and tells him that this is the third time in recent months that a little girl has been whisked away by a carjacker. The other two victims were returned soon after; days pass, however, and Martha remains missing.
What ensues is a ghoulish -- and increasingly elaborate -- game of wits between the police and the kidnapper. In addition to the creepy intellectual satisfactions of Hayder's plot, the setting here is agreeably terrifying: Marley has a strong suspicion that the kidnapper has been hanging around the Thames and Severn Canal, an especially grim section of which runs underground through an abandoned and structurally unstable tunnel. So, of course, Flea and her team just have to paddle into that tunnel to have a look around:
"Every few hundred yards they came to an air shaft: a six-foot-wide hole sunk more than a hundred feet from the surface to allow air in. ... It would have been easier to explore the tunnel by dropping in through these air shafts, if each hadn't been protected by a vast rusting grille at the bottom. Debris had been able to fall through the grilles. ... One had been used by a livestock farmer to dump animal carcasses. The weight of the dead meat had caused the grille to give way and tip a pile of stinking animal bones into the canal."
Flea is one of those obsessive detectives who heed intuition, even when cool common sense dictates that she should skedaddle out of that bleepin' tunnel as fast as her sodden feet will carry her. What she ultimately uncovers in the murk turns out to be something neither she -- nor readers -- could have possibly anticipated.
It's a tribute to Hayder's powers as a suspense writer that she completely turns the over-familiar premise of this novel inside out and upside down. The more pages of "Gone" that we captivated readers turn, the farther away we get from cliched thriller conventions.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
WHILE MORTALS SLEEP: Unpublished Short Fiction
Kurt Vonnegut
Delacorte
ISBN 978-0385343732
253 pages
$27
Reviewed by William Sheehan, the author of "At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub"
The late Kurt Vonnegut was one of the great humanist voices of the 20th century. A former prisoner of war and a witness to the firebombing of Dresden in 1945, he was also a profoundly pessimistic man with a bleak worldview fueled by what he described as "disgust with civilization." Paradoxically, though, the general tenor of his fiction was neither bleak nor bitter. It was humane, consistently funny and filled with rueful, hard-earned wisdom.
As readers of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" will remember, he famously advocated kindness in all human dealings and was fond of quoting a remark made by his like-minded son, Mark, author of "The Eden Express": "We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is."
Since his death in 2007, Vonnegut has, to our great good fortune, remained a persistent literary presence. To date, three volumes of previously unpublished early writings have appeared, and they have all been uniquely valuable. The first, "Armageddon in Retrospect" (2008), is largely notable for the title story, which gave hints of the idiosyncratic style that would eventually emerge, and for "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets," an earnest, angry nonfiction account of the bombing of Dresden. Next came "Look at the Birdie" (2009), 14 vivid, often comic slices of life in postwar America.
Now we have "While Mortals Sleep," which contains 16 stories, numerous sui-generis illustrations by the author himself and an introduction by Dave Eggers that is a model of its kind: smart, sympathetic and scrupulous in its assessment both of the stories at hand and of Vonnegut's overall place in American culture.
These stories, like much of Vonnegut's apprentice work, were written to fit the constraints of the popular short-fiction market of the day, such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. The results are decidedly less flamboyant both in style and subject matter than his later, more representative work. No one in this volume encounters an apocalyptic scenario, no one comes unstuck in time, no one is visited by sirens, from Titan or anywhere else. Vonnegut's characters are ordinary people from places like Schenectady, N.Y., and Indianapolis. They work as file clerks, window salesmen, reporters and anonymous members of female secretarial pools. They deal with the problems all of us deal with: grief, loneliness, financial pressures, personal and professional frustration.
Vonnegut draws us into these unremarkable lives with remarkable speed and efficiency. His brisk, straightforward prose resonates, even in these early pieces, with authority and understated wit. Consider, for example, the opening paragraph of the title story, "While Mortals Sleep": "If Fred Hackleman and Christmas could have avoided each other, they would have. He was a bachelor, a city editor, and a newspaper genius, and I worked for him as a reporter for three insufferable years. As nearly as I could tell, he and the Spirit of Christmas had as little in common as a farm cat and the Audubon Society."
Without flash or pyrotechnics of any sort, these three sentences lead us directly into a highly unusual Christmas story set against the backdrop of a big-city newsroom more than 50 years ago. That sense of instant accessibility dominates this collection. Each of the stories, whatever its specific nature or characteristics, is immensely readable and thoroughly entertaining.
More significant still, each of these 16 stories is about something moral. At heart, Vonnegut was a moralist, a Philosopher of the Good. And as Eggers notes, when you've lived through the kind of events that Vonnegut endured, "you've got some credit in the moral-authority bank." His beliefs and concerns were part of the very fabric of his work and, at his best, he delivered his lessons in a nondidactic, deeply engaging fashion.
In "Tango," the wealthy scion of a privileged, class-conscious New England family literally dances his way toward a new, previously unsuspected vision of life's possibilities. In "Out, Brief Candle," a middle-aged widow finds a surprising antidote to her deeply entrenched sense of solitude. "The Humbugs" recounts a competition between two dissatisfied artists that results in a small artistic renaissance for both. In "Money Talks," two young people struggle to form a bond despite the overpowering obstacle of great and sudden wealth. In "Ruth," a pregnant young widow's confrontation with her hostile, grieving mother-in-law forces her to grow in unexpected ways.
And so it goes in the world according to Vonnegut, a world where decency and compassion never cease to matter, where people struggle -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not -- against loneliness and a pervasive sense of personal insignificance. It's good to have these stories, good to hear that inimitable voice once more. It's heartening to discover that Vonnegut's work, even at this early, relatively undeveloped stage, is still vital, still affecting, still capable of helping us through this thing. Whatever it is.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
| Recent Stories |
 AGAINST ALL ODDS: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks and Second Chances
THE WEIRD SISTERS
THE WORD EXCHANGE: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY: A Novel of Berlin
GEORGE GERSHWIN |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
