Snow Falling on Cedars

SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS (David Guterson) - Three Stars

Against the background of a 1950s murder trial, Snow Falling on Cedars tells the story of a small Puget Sound isle, the Japanese-American relocation during WWII, and the code of the solitary salmon fisherman who comprise the majority of the island's economy. Unfortunately, the novel never quite decides what it wants to be its main focus: the central murder mystery, analysis of human prejudice, the psychological casualties of war, or the everyday casualties of love. Guterson has crafted an enjoyable novel that is not epic because it attempts to tackle too much.

The book is also, at times, cloyingly nostalgic. Much of the novel is told in flashbacks, but after establishing a nice structure of past and present in alternating chapters Guterson abandons this with almost 100 pages of backstory (roughly pages 150-250) that introduces a lot of turbulence into the flow of the novel. On the plus side, the three main characters (Ishmael, Hatsue, and Kabuo) are wonderfully fleshed out, detailed characters. There were a few instances where Snow... lapses into repetition, detailing the same aspects of a character's personality, but this doesn't happen too often.

I think my biggest problem with the book was that everything wraps up a little too neatly at the end. After a largely dark and serious novel, the damaged character grows a conscience and moves on, justice is served, etc. After a mostly bracing, no-holds-barred look at human flaws, the ending was a little too "Hollywood" to leave a good aftertaste.

Murder on the Orient Express

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (Agatha Christie) - Four Stars

Believe it or not, I had never read Christie before. Yes, I know, I was missing out. I'm quite aware of that now, and I'm certain there will be more Agatha in my future.

Murder on the Orient Express is, while perhaps not the best of Christie's novels (I'm not qualified to say either way), probably the most famous. The famed Orient Express train is stuck in a snowbank in Yugoslavia. One of the passengers is murdered in the middle of the night in the elite Istanbul-Calais first-class coach. All the other passengers are not only total strangers to one another but have unshakable alibis: everyone's location at the time of the murder can be supported by the eyewitness testimony of another total stranger! And so, famed Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot must solve an apparently unsolvable case...

To detail any more of the plot would be a sin, so I'll have to find meat for my review elsewhere.

Murder... is a light and breezy read. If one is the sort of person to just sit around and read for a few hours on the weekend, one could easily dispatch the novel in a single sitting (the novel is only 210 pages). I was also surprised by the wit and humor sprinkled throughout the book. Christie had a quintessential British sense of humor: dry and sly, with sparkling intelligence and subdued understatement. Some of her choicest quips literally made me laugh aloud.

Some small bits seemed a little cheesy. Christie's habit of overemphasizing dramatic revelations in italics, for instance: The call came from inside the house! That sort of thing. But then I realized, all those old mystery-story clichés probably originated with Christie and have been carried down through the years. Indeed, far from aging poorly, I think Christie's mysteries might be even more effective as the years go by: she's is smarter than the clichés. Forget every "standard" you use when solving a mystery novel, because they won't help you with Christie. She is masterful at never letting her narrative voice waver: extremely important clues pass with nary a moment of being dwelt upon. Indeed, while I caught a fair number of legitimate clues, I also bit on almost an equal number of non-clues (I hestitate using the term "red herring" because they aren't intentionally misleading, in my opinion: Christie's ambiguity and neutral tone simply aid the reader in over-thinking some parts and leaping to conclusions on others).

Lastly, while the final revelation of whodunit is somewhat surprising (it's a very slow revelation, and the reader should start to have the idea dawn on them several pages prior), Christie saves the biggest stunner for the last hundred words (so don't read ahead). Or, as Poirot says in the last sentence of the novel...

"Then," said Poirot, "having placed my solution before you, I have the honour to retire from the case..."

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (John le Carré) - Four Stars

This novel has been called by many the ultimate spy novel, and I can see why. It's free of the dapper tuxedo and martini bullshit of the James Bond world: there's no hot scientist babes in bikinis, no nuclear missile aimed at the Queen's head (or other similar hyperbolic plot device) and negligible gunplay (spies are not Rambo: their whole objective is to stay hidden and avoid attention-drawing firefights). The spies in ...Cold are grim, disillusioned, ruthless men in old trenchcoats. Men addicted to vices like booze and strippers and run down by the constant strain of pushing their brains to overdrive trying to conceive and cover every possible angle. I cannot detail the plot, because it would be a crime to spoil the great mysteries of the book. I will say that the reader should be on alert from page one, as even seemingly innocuous moments of exposition often come back into play further into the novel. Just about every detail provided to the reader is a necessary detail.

...Cold is painted in broad strokes, and the characters (with the exception of Leamas and maybe one or two others) are not delved into with great detail. The pace of the story is brisk and the plot complications numerous for such a short novel. One of ...Cold's crowning achievements is that it leads the reader along without patronizing or condescending. The astute reader will be able to unravel the plot twists, but the brilliance in the novel lies in the fact that whenever the reader unravels a particular plot twist the story itself is already two more plot twists ahead.

The book is not flawless. Stephen King has stated that "the road to hell is paved with adverbs," and John le Carre skips right along down that road. Almost all of the dialogue is graced with unnecessary adverbs (he replied cryptically, she added vaguely, he shouted angrily, she continued thoughtfully, etc.); it really only proved a minor annoyance to me, but I know it bothers some other people a great deal. Also, the coda of the book seemed a little rushed and almost haphazardly tacked on to the end of the book. The last chapter (#25 - The Wall), while perfectly in line with the realism of the novel, is a misstep in tone—a hurried, almost careless rush to the finish that doesn't flow with the clockwork precision of the rest of the novel. It should be noted that the specific details of the end didn't bother me, just the way they were set down on the page.

I wonder how well this book will age. It depicts wonderfully the animosity and cold-war tensions that gripped the world for forty years. However, I think my generation will be the last to truly understand it, as we lived through its sunset hours. The experience of living through, at the very least, the early-to-mid 1980s (or prior) is necessary to fully appreciate the novel, I think.

"What do you think spies are: priests, saints, martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London, balancing the rights and wrongs?"