Damn! I had a very busy day and almost didn’t get my newsletter out… but here it is! Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?
Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Simply Mithra
REVIEWS
Rosalie Knecht, “Who Is Vera Kelly?” (2018) (read aloud by Elisabeth Rodgers) - This one was a bit disappointing. I didn't know a ton about it, probably found out about it from an LARB article or something, put it on my wishlist, got a copy for christmas or a birthday. It's about a CIA lady spy in Buenos Aires in the sixties, the titular Vera Kelly. She's no femme fatale or Bond Girl, she's a bisexual woman from a tragic upper middle class family who gets picked up by the Company from the Greenwich Village gay scene. The blurbs didn't give a super-involved description of what she's up to in the book, but hey, Cold War Buenos Aires, spy shit, gay lady, sounds novel, let's give it a try.
I suppose if I were to try to classify this, with my very non-exhaustive knowledge of the spy fiction genre, I would say it's roughly in a le Carre mold. It's more about the inner state of the spy and the spy's interactions with others than it is about action and derring-do. I love all of the John le Carre I've read so I'm into the model, but it also seems harder to carry off than what Fleming, Ludlum etc were up to.
Vera is reasonably interesting. You hear a lot about her troubled upbringing. She's on her own in Buenos Aires, setting up bugs to spy on politicians, students, and so on. She has a handler back up in Langley sending her money and instructions, but no real backup. A coup (a real one, that led to a military government takeover in 1966) comes around, and she's betrayed by a local contact and has to figure out how to survive. She doesn't seduce any enemies in the classic sexist spy lady way, but she is able to stay low to the ground by crashing with a hookup.
The big problem is that there is no compelling mystery and no compelling bad guys or side characters. The local who betrays her is just sort of uninteresting, a Peronist heavy. The students she spies on are stereotypes of fiery upper-class radicals of the Latin American stripe, and the hook-up she stays with is a gormless Texan dude (Vera is passionate about loving women, but dabbles with dudes). She has to get out of Buenos Aires. It takes some doing, but she does. It's not terrible, but it isn't great, and I was expecting more. Apparently she quits the Company and becomes a private eye in later installments? Maybe I'll do another "let's try this disappointing genre series again" election and put that on the ballot. ***
Nalo Hopkinson, “Brown Girl in the Ring” (1998) - I gotta level with you all, readers: until maybe a month before I started this book, I thought it was about a brown girl living in a ring habitat, as seen in Larry Niven's "Ringworld," which I recently reviewed. This is why I paired that book with this in the election gimmick I did, where I had Citizens vote on themed pairs of books! I thought it would specifically show up the racism of classic scifi writers. Niven wasn't the worst with that but he wasn't the best, having contributed to the pretty racist "Lucifer's Hammer" with Jerry Pournelle. I thought the brown girl would be in the ring and show all those engineering Marty Stu's what for, or something.
This wasn't that! It's actually an old Carribean children's song sung to a ring game kids would play. Many of the chapters are opened by the lyrics of similar games. It also stands for the ring around which semi-post-apocalypse Toronto, the setting of this novel, is surrounded. First Nations sued Ontario so bad they had to give up on its biggest city! The Toronto-dwellers are trapped. This was written in the nineties so maybe the city was a bit less tidy/gentrified than it is today... Arguably, "the ring" is also the ring of combat against the fate to which Ti-Jeanne, the titular girl, might otherwise be stuck in.
Ti-Jeanne is a young woman with a baby, a missing mother, a formidable grandmother who practices West Indian spirit magic, and a fuckboy ex-lover who has one foot in and one foot out of post-apocalypse Toronto's gang scene. She doesn't have it all that bad, as far as survivors of a trapped dead city go. You see a fair amount of the city going about its life, surviving in its ruin, making little farms and businesses and stuff.
Alas, Ti-Jeanne also has a tendency to see spirits, and the future. She'd rather not be involved with the spirit world of her grandmother, dreaming of running off to the burbs with her ex-, Tony, but the spirit world has its own idea. So, too, does the Prime Minister of Canada, who needs a heart. Despite the fact that they've perfected using pig organs in this future, the PM wants a human heart, for political reasons. So, her fixers contact the gangs in the Toronto wasteland for a fresh human heart. Guess who the gang boss, Rudy, jobs it out to? Tony, the fuckboy ex, who stole from Rudy to fund his drug habit! Fuck!!
Ti-Jeanne and her family come into conflict with Tony, who can never decide if he wants to use grandma Gros-Jeanne's magic to disappear and escape, or to just cooperate with Rudy. Rudy, in turn, turns out to be a lot scarier (and more connected to Ti-Jeanne) than anyone figured, largely through the strength of using the dark side of the West Indian/Caribbean magical tradition, making zombies and enslaving duppies, the spirits of the dead. He wants to finish off the assorted Jeannes and consolidate his hold over Toronto.
Rudy comes for Tony and Ti-Jeanne, with gunmen and dark magic. Ti-Jeanne has to accept her role as a seer and ritual daughter of the spirit of the crossroads, even though it's scary and weird. Good magic, in the fine old way, doesn't help as directly as evil magic in scary situations, but evil magic comes with much higher costs.
In general, this was pretty fun. Some of the blurbs and what have you recommend reading it for social commentary, but I didn't see much of that, beyond the idea that men are maybe a tad unreliable. I think people just say that about books with protagonists who aren't white men, or upper class white women. It doesn't need the answer to racism or a particularly innovative plot, when it has well-paced action, some good gore and spooky stuff, and cromulent characters. It can be a good, fun book, which is all anyone needs it to be. ****
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Simply Mithra