Reading roundup

Days Without End
Sebastian Barry

As I read this splendidly written western, I was somehow reminded of the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who as one limb after another is lopped off scoffs, "only a flesh wound," and carries on with the fight. If at some point you think everything bad that could possibly happen to Thomas McNulty has happened, and that it is time for him to give up, well, keep on reading. And you will, because in addition to being an exciting if brutal depiction of the violence of white America's expansion into indigenous territory, it is a quirky and affecting love story, and a celebration of the English language in the manner of which only Irish writers seem capable. If in the end the battle scenes are a bit excessive, the plot twists a bit far-fetched, and the wokeness occasionally obtrusive, you will still be glad you read it.

A New Life
Bernard Malamud

Sy Levin has left New York City and moved out west to start over as a professor of literature at Cascadia College, which he assumes, erroneously, is a liberal arts school. Instead, it turns out to be a state ag/technical college, where he is assigned as an adjunct instructor of freshman comp. Levin is lonely, horny, and a little troubled, but gamely tries to make the best of it. Misadventures both sexual and departmental ensue, in the typical fashion of academic satire. What sets this book apart, unexpectedly, is its lovely description of the Pacific Northwest– its forests, contours, moisture. Malamud himself was an instructor of freshman comp at Oregon State from 1949 to 1961, and the place left its mark. The overall tone of the book is amusing to outright funny, with occasional somewhat jarring intrusions of serious melancholy and sentiment. Worth reading.

Deep River
Shusaku Endo

Many years ago I read and admired what many consider Endo's masterpiece, Silence, as well as his twisted thriller, Scandal. In his late (1993) novel Deep River, four Japanese characters find themselves on the same tour to the Hindu pilgrimage site Varanasi, India– none a Hindu, each with a past of suffering or emotional turmoil that has led them to seek some kind of spiritual reckoning or meaning. Endo's voice is channeled through Ōtsu, a Christ-like Catholic priest who ministers to the dead and dying along the banks of the Ganges, and former lover of Mitsuko, one of the travelers. The reader, like the book's tourists, is left without much closure. One might suppose Endo believes his non-Christian characters are truly lost without salvation through Christ– but then, as the Jesuit missionaries in Silence and Deep River's Ōtsu illustrate, Christian faith provides little solace in the face of human cruelty and suffering. 

Joe Country; Slough House
Mick Herron

Books 6 and 7 in the Slough House series. Am I getting just a little tired of the formula after having read my fourth? Not so tired that I won't snarf up #8 as soon as the price drops...

The Lighthouse
P.D. James

This was one of her last Dalgliesh novels, and it is a good one. A locked-room mystery set not in a locked room but on a windswept, secluded island off the Cornish coast, the setup is exactly what you would expect: Just about everyone has a motive to murder the famous author Nathan Oliver, and somebody does. And as always, the fun is not in guessing who done it but in seeing how Dalgliesh and his comrades go about solving it. As usual, much of the work is accomplished in interviews with the suspects. The denouement is, unfortunately, contrived and over-plotted, but you'll want to continue to the happy and hopeful ending for the poet-detective AD, who deserves all the best.