And on the penultimate day before Christmas, ten mini-reviews to delight even anti-squirrelists

Hard to believe, but before the week is over, I will have written something about every single 2014 release that I have listed here.  Unfortunately, I haven't had much energy for reviewing at length, reserving that for finishing out the Premio Alfaguara winners (still have three more to write over the next eight days), so here are ten paragraph-length capsule reviews of books that I finished earlier this year.  It's an eclectic book, from a story of an anarchist society to reality TV/sex tape satire and all parts in-between.  Now for the brief thoughts on these diverse works:

Margaret Killjoy, A Country of Ghosts

Lately, there have been too many dystopian novels for my taste.  Therefore, it was refreshing to learn of a narrative about an anarchist utopia set in a different world under attack from imperialist forces.  Although there were a few times that I had some mild disagreements with Killjoy's presentation of anarchist principles (then again, I'm more sympathetic to syndicalism, which does shape my attitudes somewhat), for the most part I found his treatment of his characters and their plights to be well-developed, with a good narrative flow to help maintain a nice tension throughout the novel.  Although the prose was relatively weak in comparison to thematic and character development, it was only a minor hiccup in what was otherwise an enjoyable novel.

Christopher Beha, Arts & Entertainments

I should have hated this novel.  It focuses on two recent pop culture developments, "reality" TV and "leaked" sex tapes, that really are passé to me.  Yet, somehow, Arts & Entertainments ended up being an engrossing read.  Perhaps it is because Beha manages, through the complex character of "Handsome" Eddie Hartley, simultaneously to explore just why people are drawn into whoring themselves out for fame and (unlikely) fortune while satirizing the industry that in turn exploits and manipulates both participants and audience alike.  The scenes are sometimes too much to believe, yet ultimately by novel's end, there is something of substance to be found lurking beneath the rather putrid excrement of such pop trash.  It certainly had a far greater depth of character and theme than I was prepared for after reading plot descriptions.

Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

This tale of a 36 year-old man who, at the prompting of a woman he encounters, embarks upon a redemptive pilgrimage of sorts to find out just why four high school friends of his suddenly abandoned him in college is one of the shorter, more taut Murakami novels that I've read.  There are enough several oddities and fantastical elements in here to satiate those who expect such from Murakami, but this was a darker, more reflective tale, one in which the personal quest reveals several tragedies as well as moments of reconciliation.  When I finished reading it back in August, I was uncertain what to make of this novel, as it absorbed my thoughts while reading it, yet when I finished it, I did not have a firm concept of what I thought about how well or poorly Murakami executed his themes on friendship and the ties that can unbind.  Four months later, I still am uncertain if he wrote one of his better works or if this latest novel is one of his more muted yet spectacular failures.  It certainly seems to be the sort of novel which morphs upon a re-reading.

Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

Thomas's debut novel is purportedly an Irish-American multi-generational family history, but the story centers around Eileen Tumulty (later, Leary) and her complex, sometimes fractious relationship with her husband Ed.  Their battles and love, seen over the course of the mid-20th century, take on surprising new forms as Ed becomes afflicted with Alzheimer's.  Thomas shows a deft hand in constructing Eileen and Ed's lives, as their different world-views and personalities are developed superbly.  The reader is given a vivid yet complex mosaic of their lives and by the time the novel concludes, there is not as much a sense of disappointment or tragedy as there is of witnessing two lives well-lived, each following, more or less, his or her heart's desires.  We Are Not Ourselves is one of the best debut novels I've read this year.

Nina Allan, The Race

A confession:  I do not really know what to make of Allan's first novel-length work.  It is more a mosaic than a unified novel, in which elements of four separate novellas merge in interesting fashions and shape reader understandings of what transpired in an earlier section.  This can make for some interesting textual interplay, but at times, especially when this particular reader read this only once, it can be trying to recall just precisely how each section connects to the others.  There are certainly elements of SF and murder/mystery in here, along with what might be meta-commentaries on these genres.  But there seems to be both something lurking in the depths and something missing that would tie these disparate elements together even more tautly.  The Race is one of the more intriguing debut efforts that I have read this year, but I am not certain if it isn't also one of the more fundamentally flawed in terms of its overall execution.

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize)

Despite being longlisted for the Booker Prize, The Bone Clocks might be one of Mitchell's weaker books in terms of structure and plot development.  Divided into several sections, reminiscent of his most famous work, Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks suffers whenever the focus shifts to its more supernatural storyline.  Although Mitchell is clever in re-introducing several characters from his earlier novels, he fails more often then not in crafting a cohesive meta-narrative.  The section detailing the battle between opposing supernatural "guardian"/"occult society" forces felt clichéd and hackneyed, dampening the narrative energy for most of the second half of the novel.  Although there were some bright moments throughout the narrative, on the whole, The Bone Clocks felt disjointed.  Certainly one of Mitchell's least successful narrative offerings.

Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

I greatly enjoyed Mantel's two most recent historical novels on Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII (both won Booker Prizes), but I was uncertain as to whether or not the richness of setting and characterization would translate well to the short story milieu.  For the most part, Mantel does an outstanding job constructing her stories, as each tale feels different in tone and setting from the others, yet there is a uniform quality of characterization and prose to each of them.  Although there were a couple of stories that felt slighter than the others, this is perhaps as much a matter of reader preference as anything else.  Mantel is certainly one of the better stylists writing today and this is on full display in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van (longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction)

Darnielle is more famous for his work as the singer/songwriter for The Mountain Goats, but here in his debut novel, Wolf in White Van, he manages to parley his talents as a songwriter into the longer novel medium.  It is a deceptive novel, one that lays out its central premise within its opening pages, only to revisit and rework that premise in subsequent chapters.  It is a combination of a live-action role-playing game and something darker, something that lurks within the recesses of the Trace Italian game designer's mind.  As the novel progresses, the setting deepens, with some surprising twists and turns.  Darnielle is a very talented writer, and several scenes are effective in part due to how well he constructs and narrates them.  Although the ending was relatively weaker than preceding sections, Wolf in White Van was one of the more entertaining debut novels that I've read this year.

Ben Lerner, 10:04

The success, or failure, of Lerner's second novel, 10:04, depends upon how readily the reader is willing to separate quasi-fact from fiction.  Like his previous novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, there is a semi-direct authorial stand-in present in the main character.  At times, this perceived semi-factual viewpoint adds a sense of veracity to the narrative, but at other times, the artifice is too self-conscious, leaving a slightly disagreeable aftertaste of navel gazing.  This is a shame, as Lerner is a talented writer, able to say more with a few pithy sentences than what many authors manage to achieve with pages of description or dialogue.  The premise of 10:04 was interesting for the most part, but Lerner's penchant for self-reflection weakens the narrative's flow at some of the story's more crucial points.  Certainly one of the more mixed reactions that I had to any 2014 release read this year.

Jay Lake, Last Plane to Heaven

Lake's stories, both novel-length and short fiction alike, have been a mixed bag for me.  Often, he would create a vivid setting peopled with some interesting characters, only for there to be something about the story's structure or its prose (or vice versa) that would hinder my enjoyment of the unfolding story.  In his last, posthumous collection, Last Plane to Heaven, there are a wealth of diverse tales that are a testament to his creativity.  However, there are some several clunkers that just do not feel as well-realized as his more successful tales.  At times, it was hard to believe that the same writer penned these tales, as the quality, not to mention the tone and presentation, varied so much from story to story.  Yet there are enough good tales to justify giving this collection a chance.  Just do not be surprised if there are several tales that will do nothing for you.

2012 Booker Prize Winner: Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

The forest stretched ahead for days.  Sometimes antique weapons are unearthed:  axes that, wielded with double fist, could cut down horse and rider.  Think of the great limbs of those dead men, stirring under the soil.  War was their nature, and war is always keen to come again.  It's not just the past you think of, as you ride these fields.  It's what's latent in the soil, what's breeding; it's the days to come, the wars unfought, the injuries and deaths that, like seeds, the soil of England is keeping warm.  You would think, to look at Henry laughing, to look at Henry praying, to look at him leading his men through the forest path, that he sits as secure on his throne as he does on his horse.  Looks can deceive.  By night, he lies awake; he stares at the carved roof beams; he numbers his days.  He says, 'Cromwell, Cromwell, what shall I do?'  Cromwell, save me from the Emperor.  Cromwell, save me from the Pope.  Then he calls in his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and demands to know, 'Is my soul damned?'

For nearly five centuries now, the passion play that is the life and times of Henry VIII's court and king has fascinated historians and laypeople alike.  With the exception of relatively minor antecedents such as Wycliffe and the Lollards, England in the 16th century did not seem to be as ripe for rebellion against papal authority/church traditions as were several of the German states; it was more of a top-down phenomenon there than in the Holy Roman Empire.  Yet what caused Henry VIII to first divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and then proceed through that infamous litany of "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived?"  Who were the masterminds, if any such Faustian ministers could be said to be thus, that shepherded the king to divorce England from the Catholic faith?  For centuries, these questions have bedeviled contemporaries and their descendents alike and the literary works that have touched upon this, ranging from Shakespeare to Robert Bolt to hagiographies of St./Sir Thomas More and others such as Thomas Cranmer, have populated bookshops for centuries.

The latest entry into this realm of historical speculative fiction is a planned trilogy by Hilary Mantel that focuses (at first) on the life and career of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from the lower classes to become one of the chief architects of Henry VIII's annulment of his marriage to Catherine and the subsequent declaration of the King of England being head of the Catholic dioceses there.  These events Mantel covered deftly and with aplomb in her 2009 Booker Prize-winning opening volume, Wolf Hall.  While that novel was well-written and added excellent moments of narrative tension, it pales in comparison to the second volume, Bring Up the Bodies, which covers events from after the execution of More in 1534 to the execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, in 1536.

Historical novels are very difficult to write convincingly.  Too often, novelists find themselves constricted by the known facts to create interesting characters out of historical people, especially when these characters are famous.  It is often easier to create a fictional character who manages to summarize the chaotic or exciting events of a time while s/he only intersects fittingly with the "real" people.  Or perhaps, as Alexandre Dumas was wont to do with his Musketeer novels, a minor historical person has their role expanded and fictionalized to an extent to create a narrative that is both "real" and exciting.  Mantel in both Wolf Hall and here in Bring Up the Bodies, has chosen a third, more difficult path, that of using major historical figures to reconstruct a tumultuous and sometimes mysterious epoch in English history.  Too easily the characters and situation could have devolved into a shallow mystery/thriller-type novel; one only has to look at Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time to see a historical reconstruction that takes on too many aspects of the murder-mystery for it to be viewed as anything beyond just that.

No, what Mantel's representations of not just Cromwell, but also Boleyn, the ambassador from the court of Emperor Charles V, Cranmer, and the divorced Catherine show is a complex weaving of character and situation to create a narrative tension that slowly builds through the first half of the novel before it explodes in the novel's final chapters.  For centuries, the events leading up to Boleyn being charged with adultery and treason were shrouded with mystery.  The extant evidence is contradictory in places and there are hints that political machinations involving the family of Jane Seymour (Henry VIII's soon-to-be third wife, who later died giving birth to the sickly future King Edward VI) did lie, if not quite at the center of the charges against Boleyn, at least somewhat more than just a peripheral role in the matter.  Mantel judiciously notes this without overplaying this possible angle. 

If anything, what makes Bring Up the Bodies' second half so strong is that Mantel has created several plausible possibilities for the charges against Boleyn that the reader may find herself trying to anticipate which may be the strongest clue to the eventual denouement.  Yet the novel is more than the presentation of evidence regarding a historical political intrigue.  It also excels at being a great character-driven novel.  Whereas Wolf Hall centered around Cromwell to the near-exclusion of other PoVs, here in Bring Up the Bodies the perspectives of other characters adds to the building drama.  The fate of Boleyn feels as foreordained and morbidly fascinating as that of Santiago Nasar's murder as outlined in Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold.  This creation of tension within a fictionalization of an event already well-known is impressive and Mantel's opulent descriptions contrasted with the shifts in perspective is nothing short of brilliant.

Bring Up the Bodies certainly is a deserving winner of the 2012 Booker Prize.  Its prose is excellent, the characterizations are top-notch, and the narrative construction not only is ambitious but it also manages to achieve its lofty goals.  In a year filled with excellent contenders, it stands out due to the difficulties (noted above) that it managed to overcome.  Mantel joins the rare company of those authors who have won the Booker Prize twice and she is the first writer to have a sequel win this prestigious award.  Simply put, it is the best out of a group of books that is much stronger than last year's weak shortlist.