Reading roundup

The Ghost Road
Pat Barker

The third novel in the Regeneration trilogy is thematically and stylistically the most ambitious of the series and, for the most part, equally as compelling as the first two. The book's characters are haunted by dreams, daydreams, memories, and ghosts– real or metaphorical– and by very real traumas and dilemmas. I was not completely convinced by the passages in which real-life protagonist William Rivers recalls and reflects upon his encounters with Melanesians in his earlier life as an ethnographer, but one cannot dismiss the brutal irony of a British colonial culture that could fear and condemn ritual acts of human sacrifice in the South Seas while sending countless thousands of its own youth off to the killing fields of Europe... "Dulce et decorum." 

The Lathe of Heaven
Ursula K. Le Guin

The multiverse plot done right. Le Guin's short novel blends her characteristic humanism with an Aladdin's lamp "be careful what you wish for" fable– the source of the story's humor as well as its sting. In its 184 pages you'll also get an alien invasion, a prescient portrayal of post climate-change Portland, and a very sweet love story, all wrapped up in a well-written 184-page package. Bravo! 

Bad Actors
Mick Herron

The latest Slough House; a solid addition to the series. The baddest (in the bad sense) of the bad actors is, as usual, a populist-authoritarian political grifter. It's all about politics, as well as the professional love-hate relationship between our "hero" Jackson Lamb and his ally-nemesis, head spook Diana Taverner. Their symbiosis and grudging mutual respect form the driving force of the series. Comparisons with Le Carré are not entirely apt, given the mischievously comic tone of Herron's books, but the two authors definitely share similarly cynical politics and a sense that the career British spies they write about are – to paraphrase Churchill – the worst people in the world, except for all the others. While recovering from my first-ever and nasty case of covid recently, I watched A Most Wanted Man, the film adaptation of Le Carré's novel starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. The plot is not Le Carré at his best, but the movie is solid, and of course Hoffman is always worth watching. He is ideal as the world-weary master spy with a conscience, a la Smiley. Jackson Lamb is cut from the same cloth, despite his cover of crass buffoonery and equal-opportunity bigotry. As the series continues (now up to #8), with each of Lamb's triumphs and acts of kindness and loyalty it has become increasingly implausible that any of the characters is really taken in by Lamb's schtick. The avid reader certainly knows better. I await #9 nonetheless.

The Wallcreeper
Nell Zink

There's little question that this novella is well written, and it features some appealing birds, in particular the eponymous little fellow, a distant relative of our beloved nuthatches. As for the first-person narrator, she is alternately funny and frustrating– in a book published in 2014, I find it a little difficult to buy a protagonist who is a smart woman yet so deferential to a series of untrustworthy dudes. Is she really just in it for the sex? And I wasn't sure what to make of the quick and tidy ending. Lesson learned? Or last laugh on her? Or on us?