A Matter of Malice

by Thomas King (2019)

This was an entertaining light read, with some links to a traditional detective story and some distinctions.

I enjoyed the narrator’s wry observations on small-town life and his quirky voice. It’s exactly the voice I remember from King’s CBC radio series, The Dead Dog Café. This is both good and bad. It’s familiar and comfortable. But it suggests that King has not developed much in the many years since the radio show.

The characters in the story are a broad collection of stereotypes, from the sheriff who just wants to keep things quiet in town, to the hard LA television producer who will do anything to get a show done.

King’s detective, Thumps DreadfulWater, wants to avoid getting involved in the investigation, and pushes away from it every chance he gets. He seems bemused, observing life from outside with an ironic detachment, but staying away from it as much as he can. But he doesn’t change either, in spite of a new diagnosis of diabetes and an ultimatum of sorts from his life partner. Nevertheless, he’s an intelligent observer. He not only sees connections that others have missed, partly because they have not tried to see them, but he also seems to intuit strategies for getting the criminals to confess their crimes.

His detachment, presumably, comes from his position as an Indigenous person living in white society. He clearly does not identify with the small Montana town of Chinook, although he has many friends there. He relates more deeply to the Indigenous characters, but he’s not close to them either, and he seems to want to stay away from reserve life. This may be a reflection of King’s mixed Cherokee and Greek heritage, not fully one or the other even though he identifies as Indigenous. DreadfulWater certainly seems to embody King’s voice, so I take him as some sort of stand-in for the author’s way of thinking.

While this has some elements of the western detective novel – the ironic, detached detective, the exaggerated characters, the improbable murder – it avoids the casual violence and replaces it with humour. This is a welcome turn, making the book an enjoyable read, even if lightweight.

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

 by James Baldwin (1968)

This is a dense and fascinating story, as much a reflection on racism in America as it is the story of a man’s life and illusions. The title phrase does not seem to appear in the text, and when I began I wondered what it’s meaning was. By the end, it seems to me that it’s a comment on the life of the central character, who works through his life to overcome the racist society he lives in, but finally finds that the success train has left before he ever got to the station. He was never going to be on it, no matter how much he rose in his art.

The scenes of Leo’s young life in Harlem show the impact of racism on his family, especially on his father. The threat of violence from the police and the fear of violence from white people shapes Leo’s existence. This becomes even more intense when he spends a summer at a small-town theatre camp together with a white woman friend. Nevertheless, he wants to fight against the racism and make his own future.

In some ways, Leo’s character could be a stand-in for Baldwin, a successful Black man who challenges racism and has to continually defend his choices. He has friends and allies, but being a public figure calling for justice is stressful and leads to the heart attack that makes him pause and re-examine his life. The apparent futility of his life work eventually draws him toward armed resistance. I’m not sure if that was the conclusion that Baldwin came to personally, but it is where he leaves his central character.

The story is also about Leo’s relationship with his older brother, Caleb. Leo loves and admires Caleb, a natural leader who responds with rage to the racism they grew up with in Harlem. Leo is devastated when Caleb is wrongly imprisoned for theft by racist police (and corrupted Black criminals). Caleb later becomes a preacher, swallows his rage and challenges Leo’s anger and radicalism. Is this a suggestion that Black leaders can work within the church to create a separate world? Or that the church provides a haven for defeated Black men? Leo wants to kill the white people who have damaged his brother, but he has to painfully reject his brother’s reactionary passivity and fight the racism that dominates all of their lives. By succeeding in the theatre, Leo wants to inspire other black people to overcome the racism they face. At one point, though, he sees a parallel between the church and the theatre, and by the end his success seems as limited as his brother's. In a scene near the end of the novel, he has lunch with the family of his closest friend, a white woman from Tennessee. In her family, he finds just a thin layer of politeness and liberalism covering a deep racism.

In some respects, this could be a depressing story, given the way that racism remains in contemporary society since Baldwin wrote it over 50 years ago. Somehow it isn’t depressing, at least not to me. Baldwin’s characters fight a terrible, devastating struggle, but they continue to fight, and they are ready to escalate if they have to. Baldwin suggests that they won’t stop until they succeed. The alternative is to succumb to insubstantial beliefs that are deadening. Baldwin portrays Leo’ rage and the social conditions that drive it, and makes the reader feel it too, along with the fear and despair that go along with it.

And perhaps the tone is also raised by the beautiful prose that Baldwin writes with. In every paragraph I could hear the cultured voice that he used in his public debates and talks. It’s such a pleasure to hear the language that it made me slow down to read each sentence in my head. This is not a book that I wanted to to skim through quickly.  

A Delicate Truth

 By John Le Carré, 2013

In this book, Le Carré continues his theme of updating the spy novel by focusing on its contemporary forms. In this case, his target is the private broker trading information and muscle with government operators who prefer to keep things out of the public eye.

With his usual understated style, he directs considerable anger at those who do undercover operations for money – clearly separating them from those in the official business who do necessary bad stuff on principle. In his cold war novels, there is a distinct ambivalence about doing nasty things in the service of the state. You do what you have to do to prevent a worse outcome, but you become morally compromised and that bothers you. The novels with more modern themes don’t have that ambivalence. The perpetrators are self-interested venal thieves and murderers with links into the spy world. In this story, they have enticed an ambitious, and equally venal, junior minister into a poorly judged and poorly executed scheme. The minister loses his political future, his staffers are shifted out to plumb positions where they won’t be around to raise any questions, and the private brokers carry on in apparent luxury. Interestingly, it seems to be the state security service who cleans things up to avoid embarrassing the government.

While this is the scene, the attention is really on the decent Britons who are entrapped in the scheme without being aware of it. When they get wind that things did not go as they were told, they want to put things right. Of course, this will involve significant cost to themselves, and the barriers they have to overcome make up the bulk of the novel. This part is Le Carré’s familiar storytelling, low-key spycraft slowly leading to a conclusion. His oblique style of dialogue is also familiar here, with characters carefully saying one thing in a chummy middle-class voice and meaning something other. Perhaps this is how it’s done in this world.

For Le Carré, these decent Britons are the flawed heros of the story. They are not perfect – they have second thoughts, they wonder if it’s worth it, they are distracted. For this novel, they seem a bit too decent. They choose to do the right thing, knowing that there will be consequences. In his other novels, Le Carré’s characters seem to do what they have to do because they don’t have a choice. The situations force them to make the only choice they can short of selling out. While I don’t doubt that there are decent honorable civil servants in Britain, this sort of purity makes the story line a little questionable.

And then there’s the moral dis-equivalency. State agencies, including the British security services, carry out operations to protect their interests and the interests of their political superiors. To what extent does it matter that the operations are carried out by mercenaries? Are the controls really set to a higher standard for state actors than for their hirelings? I do think that there is a potential for greater control when government oversight is involved but there’s also a potential for greater self-justification. But does that justify the level of outrage that Le Carré reflects here? Or, to go deeper, how is the combination of state and private action in this story different from the machinations against the operations of the Cold War enemies? Is it worse now because the targets are vaguely defined potential terrorists from a string of Muslim countries? Le Carré seems to think so, and perhaps he is right, but with a writer who seems to insist on a moral standard these are questions that make me question the initial premiss of the book.

In any case, at least these are questions that the story raises, unlike the action-oriented focus of many other spy stories.