Southern Discomfort: The Bone Tree a novel by Greg Iles

The Bone Tree is the second novel in a trilogy by Greg Iles that involves the investigative work of a southern lawyer, Penn Cage. Taking up the story from Iles’s Natchez Burning, Penn and the publisher of the Natchez Examiner, Caitlin Masters, continue their work investigating the homegrown terrorist activities of local millionaire and power broker Brody Royal. Penn has a deeply personal stake because his father Dr. Cage has been the target of attempted murder by assassins instigated by Royal, the supposed head of a secret southern terrorist group.   Caitlin is seeking a second Pulitzer Prize for her work during recent years exposing the local and national political activity of this group that is part of the still active KKK.  

 Penn, with the help of FBI Special Agent John Kaiser investigate the current criminal behavior of The Double Eagles, the selective KKK group including wealthy and politically connected Mississippi men. Caitlin explores the history of the group, gathering information and writing stories about a geographical focal point for their terrorist activity called “the bone tree.” 

Penn discovers that a man named Forrest Knox, Double Eagle member and head of Mississippi’s Criminal Investigation Bureau, may be the real leader of the secret KKK group who uses his office to intimidate and cover up a history of civil rights violations. Caitlin discovers that a link to these violations may be stories spanning decades of evil deeds committed at a great cypress tree in the wilds of the Mississippi Lusahatcha Swamp. Tales of Pre-Columbian Natchez Indians who considered the tree to be connected to the spirit world, atrocities committed by southern troops against fleeing Yankees during the Civil War, the hunting and torture of African Americans by slave hunters, and murders related to civil rights activities in more recent history emerge as Caitlin follows leads in her stories.

The complicated plot involves many details of history and character interaction that fill every page of the lengthy (802 pages) novel. Greg Iles’s writing in The Bone Tree reminds me of the work of EdwardRutherfurd’s novel, Paris (2013), in terms of length, historical detail, scope, and writing style. With both writers, the novels are meant to be read carefully with attention to detail. Greg Iles makes the interesting case that the most evil deeds are atavistic in nature with people going to great lengths to hide their persistent inborn aggression from the eyes of men but not the perception of God. I am looking forward to reading the third volume of the trilogy.

Form and Free Expression: The Counterfeiters a novel by Andre Gide

Andre Gide’s The Counterfeiters is a novel about individual development and in a society structured by deceit. The French author started writing the novel after World War I and continued working on it for years until it was finally published in 1925. Set in Paris, the story includes upper middle class adolescent boys and the men who exploit them. The plot progresses in a somewhat disjointed fashion as Gide inserts psychoanalytic insights popular at the time. Some of Gide’s journal entries, included as an appendix to the novel, indicate a dissatisfaction with his ability to produce seamless connections between realistic structure and unconscious processes.
 
In the first half of the novel, the young characters are introduced, and their intellectual, social, and artistic developments are described in an engaging manner reminiscent of Balzac. The reader is involved in the plot and cares about the behavior of each of the boys. The children are becoming adults without the realization that a single immature act can determine a life path.
 
In the second half of the book, the pace of the plot slows as Gide inserts an increasing number of psychological interpretations into the story. The device he uses is a journal written by a novelist character, Edouard, who is using his experience with the boys and their families to write his own novel. With this voice, Gide is able to discuss events from the point of view of a witness who is intimately involved in the action and assumes the role of psychoanalyst.
 
The final chapters of the novel demonstrate Gide’s success in the integration of form and free expression as the plot accelerates to chaos and resolution. The reader understands that all of the boys are counterfeiters in their interactions with family, friends, and others. This is expected from adolescents who are impulsive and largely ignorant of life’s consequences. But we do not expect the adult characters to be counterfeiters, trying to deceive by pretense and dissembling in order to exploit the boys socially, intellectually, and sexually. Though this counterfeit life is habitual in the adults, Gide provides hope that the younger generation is capable of insight and judgment and can avoid dissolute lives.
 
Complete redemption by the boys is possible if they recognize the immorality of their external counterfeit roles. Also, they must learn to stop the narcissistic internal voice that speaks to them incessantly reflecting the counterfeit influence of parents and friends. Finally, they can enter a kind of external silence that allows genuine communication with other people, without guile or envy, and experience a compassionate and selfless immersion in the lives of others. The Counterfeiters is a good example of an author's imagined experience in the writing of a novel.

Love and Social Timing: The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay a novel by Andrea Gillies

The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay by Andrea Gillies is a novel of a relationship triangle, or as Nina sees it, a circle of love. Triangle or circle, Nina’s view was two dimensional from childhood to middle age. There were two brothers in the Romano family, friends of Nina’s parents. The three were best of friends throughout childhood and young adulthood. Nina had a happy, physical, and uninhibited relationship with Luca and a more intense, rational, and judgmental interaction with the older brother Paolo.

Reviewing her life from middle age, Nina believes at first that the social timing of events determined the outcome of her triangular/circular relationship with the Romano brothers, marrying and maintaining a formal contract with one and separating from the informal bonds of friendship with the other. In solitary retrospection, Nina discovers that there are two types of timing: intimate and social. With intimate relationships, love determines the timing of social events. With the development and maintenance of a friendship, social timing determines life paths. Whether the timing is pre-determined or serendipitous, the triangle/circle two dimensional view of Nina’s relationships is hopelessly inadequate to explain her current situation. Realizing the close parallel with her mother’s unexpected social and intimate life decisions, Nina concludes she has also confused movement with action. Like her mother, she has failed to distinguish the two types of timing that determine life paths resulting in the wasting of the precious time of her past life. With this insight, can she avoid wasting more of her life?

This is a very well-written introspective novel that slowly unfolds with the intersection of additional triangle/circles involving Nina with secondary characters.

Forebearance: Logos a novel by John Neeleman

Logos by John Neeleman is a historical novel that embeds the reader in the daily lives of people living in Jerusalem, part of the Roman Empire during the first century AD. The focus of the story of the origin of Christianity is on the drive toward power of privileged ruling and intellectual classes of Romans, Jews, and others. The politicians, military, scholars, and religious had exclusive access to and control of information. They were the keepers of this vital resource and were passionate about using it to establish ways of life controlling social, economic, political, and religious behavior.  The leaders believed that governance requires a logos, principles and knowledge of human existence that are required for a genuine understanding and acceptance by all members of society.  

The ancient Greeks established a logos that represented an understanding of the need for living order based on a system of legends, a mythology. The Jews had established a logos that was developed by ancient Hebrews that described one transcendent God who revealed himself to Abraham, Moses and Hebrew prophets. The logos developed by Jews was self-contained, geographically centered in Jerusalem, and carefully described in sacred scrolls. The tradition of Moses and the Ten Commandments was a starting point for conscious conformity of Jews to a simple and direct logos. The Roman leaders realized that a logos must apply not only to the privileged classes, but must be presented to the masses in a way that justified the leaders’ territorial and societal control. In the Roman Empire, daily living rewards and punishments and the sacrifice of lives and treasure in war should be immediately understandable and justified for all, including the undereducated lower classes. 

In this novel, Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was a triumph in secular strength and dominance over the Jewish logos. In order for Christianity to develop, documents were needed describing a logos involving a single god and a single set of rules for people to understand in which all people have personal freedom within limits. Under the rule of the Romans, a Gospel was needed that would allow people to conform to secular rules and maintain a sense of divinely given individual free will. It seemed that in order to maintain a stable logos, a combination of Christian principles and understanding offering a fundamental separation of state and church was required.

The story of the novel involves the thoughts and actions of the wandering Jew, Jacob as he lived and traveled in and around Jerusalem and ultimately Rome. His mother, Helen, was a Jew whose people were scholars, Lawyers, judges, mayors, and philosophers. She was well-educated and spoke Greek and Latin and rarely spoke Hebrew except with her husband. Jacob’s father was a carpenter and a priest who spoke only Hebrew and Aramaic. His people were tradesmen and priests concentrated in Jerusalem who had built and maintained the Holy Temple. Through the influence of his mother, Jacob was given a classical education in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics by Marcus, a Jew with the finest and most extensive library in Jerusalem.  Through the influence of his father, a renowned Jerusalem Temple builder, Jacob learned the building trade through an apprenticeship.

Jacob’s unique education, training, and privileged social status allowed him to associate with the leaders of government, commerce, and religion. He travels throughout the Middle East experiencing and learning from the people living under Roman rule, and the relatively small groups of people who had found a separate peace in remote areas outside of the mainstream of commerce, war, and religion.  Jacob was accepted as an intelligent and usually non-threatening observer of many of the government, military, and religious leaders of his time. Was Jacob the one chosen by man and God to write a unifying logos of Christianity? Did many years of study, sacrifice, travel, connections, and interactions with both secular and religious leaders qualify him to write a uniquely Christian Gospel?

Logos is a challenge to read because of the rich detail of the history of the First Century AD. The reader travels with Jacob driven by a search for a unifying philosophy, a logos, that would appeal to a broad range of people from the ruling classes and the undereducated masses. The novel certainly made me consider the importance of a universal unifying logos in our current international state of affairs.   

Within the Vortex: Hausfrau a novel by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Hausfrau is the first novel written by poet, Jill Alexander Essbaum. It is the interesting story of an expatriate American woman, Anna Benz who took the path of least resistance by marrying a steady as he goes Swiss banker, Bruno. Living in Zurich, Anna has not minded the feeling of being an outsider in the Swiss culture for ten years. In fact, she has not really mastered the Swiss language of her husband and her two young sons. She decides to take a German class (close to but not equal to Schwiizerdutsch) to improve her ability to speak at home and with acquaintances. In class, Anna realizes that her private self-talking English language is quite complex and nuanced compared to the language she uses with other ouslanders. Her secret life is reinforcing in the sense of a comforting solitude, and she protects it by playing a quiet non-reactive role in a barren play with her family and acquaintances.

But Anna discovers that life is not a play and solitude can satisfy many protective needs but not the most important social needs of a person. Meeting her sexual needs, for example, requires  secretive actions that are difficult given her mental game of isolation. Depression becomes a constant companion. Even her psychiatrist cannot break through the verbal walls to help her. No one speaks Anna’s language, and over the ten years living in Switzerland, the barriers to meaningful interaction slowly have become immutable.

What happens when you learn you have played the solitude game too long? Anna is a very intelligent and sensitive person who begins to look for a way out. Hausfrau is a very interesting character study that gives insight into the reader’s own conflicts between internal language and external social roles. It is unrelenting in the exploration of ineffectual imaginary defenses that are inevitably overcome by real circumstances. This is a very well-written and enjoyable contemporary novel.

 

Politics, Religion, and Police Work: The Deliverance of Evil by Roberto Costantini, Translated from the Italian by N. S. Thompson

The Deliverance of Evil is part one of a trilogy by Roberto Costantini. The detailed and lengthy (564 pages) thriller is the story of a young police captain, Michele Balistreri, beginning in Rome in 1982. The very good translation from Italian by N. S. Thompson captures the daily life of the citizens of Rome including solid citizens, gypsies, prostitutes, criminals, politicians, police officers, wealthy royalty, lay guests and religious of the Vatican, and Catholic church officials. Balistreri has a troublesome, secretive, and violent political past but has been saved from prosecution by his brother, a man with strong membership in the influential Christian Democrats political party.

Balistreri misses his past life of danger and makes up for it in debauchery. He certainly does not take his police captain duties or his use of women seriously. He spends most of his time rousting people with his badge in hand, drinking from dawn until dusk, and seeking new women to conquer sexually. As a result of his lack of attention, Balistreri makes a serious mistake in an investigation of a murder during the World Cup soccer match between Italy and West Germany. The drunken misogynist gets into trouble but manages to keep his police job because of his brother’s political connections.  

The novel jumps several decades in time, and the reader follows the subdued-by-age Balistreri as he drags through his life focused on recovering from damage he did to himself physically and emotionally as a young man. Due to his early failure as a stand-up man, he thinks of himself as a degenerate no better than the criminals he chased. In the 2000s he has straightened up enough to be chosen as the head of a police unit dealing with crimes by foreigners. This is a good position for Balistreri outside of the mainstream of city police work in Rome. Balistreri’s aggressive style of dealing with women and criminals has changed, and now he carefully watches his diet and religiously takes his antidepressant medication.

The past in the form of the 1982 unsolved murder haunts Balistreri in his mind and in reality during the 2006 World Cup, déjà vu all over again. He has to decide whether to live as a man or continue his holding pattern of careful work framed by personal regret and misery. He has become a toady to Rome’s dominant political and social players, careful to keep his police staff from making any controversial waves. Is it the right time for redemption and does he have the right stuff to achieve it?

The novel includes many interesting references to political history and current interactions between the Vatican and the social/political ruling class in Italy. The descriptions of the problems related to the growing legal and illegal immigrant population in Italy are interesting in light of our own US problems with immigration. 

The Deliverance of Evil is a good tour de force narrative rich in the detailed descriptions of Italian life. This causes some reduction in the pace and tension of the story but the reader gets a good idea of the high energy life in Rome. I look forward to reading the next novel in the proposed trilogy, The Root of All Evil, due to be published in April.