The Redbreast - Jo Nesbo

I haven't posted in a while because I've had a summer so busy I barely had time to read for pleasure, and because I ran out of new books! Usually I have a stack waiting, but this summer I didn't have new things handy to read. Last week I picked up a paperback at the supermarket of a title I had heard good things about - The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo.

Jo Nesbo is a Norwegian author, and his detective, Harry Hole, is a Norwegian cop. One good thing about the publication and popularization of "The Girl With Dragon Tattoo" series is that more attention is being paid to Scandinavian writers, with many of them now being marketed as "the next Stieg Larsson". None of them really are, but there are some decent books that I have found this way and The Redbreast is one of them.

It begins when Harry Hole, stationed along the motorcade route of the visiting President of the United States, shoots a man in a tollbooth near his checkpoint. Is the man an assassin, or a Secret Service agent who the Norwegian police have not been told about?

As a result of the shooting, Harry gets "promoted" - to get him out of the way, and to show the general public that the police force is standing behind him. It is at his new position as an Inspector that Harry begins to investigate a series of murders that lead back into the history of Norway in World War II.

Not surprisingly, the background is unfamiliar to American readers and takes some adjustment, but Nesbo works things in quite smoothly, and one can get the gist of the culture, the geography, and the relationships without being all that familiar with Scandinavian culture. I especially liked the development of Harry's relationship with a colleague who is a single mother and the dance they do to become comfortable with getting to know one another. It is one of the more realistic depictions I have seen.

I see a couple other of his novels are available in English, so there is something else to look forward to.

The Land of the Painted Caves - Jean Auel

The last of the Clan of the Cave Bear series, this novel is another example of how a popular and best-selling author goes so far astray because she begins to believe that she is above the need for a decent editor. This book is full of digression, info dump, and character betrayal. I envision that Jean Auel did a ton of research on cave paintings and could not bear to leave a word of it out. But she should have. Her main character, Ayla, visits cave after cave, and she and other medicine women and spiritual leaders talk about the paintings. And talk about them. For pages and pages, and chapters and chapters. Nothing much else happens for a long, long time.

Near the end, perhaps realizing that she doesn't have much of a plot, so she changes Jondalar into a completely different person, one who apparently has changed from a man who desperately loves Ayla into one who has casual sex with a former girlfriend because he gets bored because Ayla is busy looking at paintings in caves. Really, when will he get up in the morning and put his head on backwards? When does Wolf do a jitterbug and the horses fly and we all find out that this is a history of Mars?

Obviously, I have contempt for someone who has written a six-book series that ends with such a weak effort.

My advice is to read the first two books (Clan of the Cave Bear & The Valley of the Horses) and forget the rest. It's all downhill from there.

Rulers of Darkness/Daughter of Darkness

Oh, my, more vampire books.

These novels by Steven Spruill are not new. I actually picked up the second one first and finally ordered the first one from a used book store as it is out of print. I have to admit that I like vampire books, although these are not top-notch. But the premise on how a vampire is born is different in these books than in others. In Spruill's world, vampires are called hemophages and the condition is genetic. Some few humans become ill with leukemia at puberty. If they are able to obtain blood, they transform into vampires. Otherwise, they die.

With this premise, they can't infect normal people or make people into vampires, so a great deal of the threat/temptation of the vampire meme is sort of lost. Much of the underlying sensual attractions of other vampire series such as the Anne Rice books or the Twilight saga is the love/hate relationship that the reader, as a "normal" has with the idea of vampirism. You could live forever, have great powers, and be nearly immortal - but you have to kill people and drink blood to do it. That moral dilemna is absent here.

Merrick Chapman, a nine hundred year old hemophage, is a police detective (he gets the first information when another phage might be responsible for killings) and is able to catch them and cover up the existance of the breed from normal people, thus keeping himself safe. Merrick has trained himself to exist by stealing blood through transfusions rather than by killing, but apparently his restraint is rare (and scorned by others of his kind). Since the only way to kill a phage is to deprive it of blood, he has a secret dungeon where the captured phages slowly starve to death. It's quite a grim premise.

But Merrick's weakness is that he loves humans. He wants to be a shepherd rather than a wolf. He falls in love, marries, then eventually must fake his own death (since he doesn't age) and move on, but he stays faithful to each wife until she dies, even though she, thinking him dead, doesn't know it. He also has had children, but only one, Zane, has become a hemophage.

In Rulers of Darkness, Zane and Merrick clash as Zane wants to rid himself of Merrick so he can kill with impunity, and Merrick wants to imprison Zane to keep him from murder. But Zane has a daughter, and she is twelve and ill with leukemia. Merrick knows what she is, and feels he has to let her die, but after Zane gives her blood, Merrick's goal is to teach her to live without killing.

Daughter of Darkness is Jennifer's story as she becomes a young woman, grows into her life as a hemophage, and falls in love. But when some gristly murders begin again, she has to ask herself if her lover, Hugh, is a hemophage - and if she really wants the answer to be yes.

Both are decent books, worth an initial read but not a second one.

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

A new book and one with many good reviews, so I picked this up on my Nook, but I am not sure what I think about ths yet. The premise of the book is that Bruno is a chimp born in a zoo, sold to an experimental lab at a university, who acquires language, falls in love with the female doctoral student who works with him, and begins to "evolve" into a human being.

Bruno becomes so educated that his vocabulary is filled with erudite language. He becomes a painter and actor. He loses his fur due to the stress of loving Lydia and their relationship becoming public when she is found to have a brain tumor. She is pregnant with their child. Their apartment is staked out by a streetcorner preacher and his followers, all of them alternately praying for and condemning them. Bruno walks upright, and after losing his hair, begins to make the final transition toward looking like a human with the help of plastic surgery.

The premise seemed promising, but the book sprawls out and Bruno is not a sympatheic character, and the story, told as Bruno is dictating his memoirs, is full of side comments, philosophy of the theatre and literature, and ultimately seems cold-blooded and dry. It is hard to feel much about the relationship between Bruno and Lydia, hard to feel sad or sympathetic of their trials and stresses. It's difficult to feel much of anything about it all.