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Broken Harbour by Tana French

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Broken Harbour, #4 Dublin Murder Squad: The story is told by Michael “Scorcher” Kennedy, whom we first met in Faithful Place as Frank Mackey’s asshole of a colleague. The beauty of the first person POV is transformation of judgment: now that Scorcher is your eyes and ears, he is no longer “just” an asshole. He is a living, breathing man shaped by a past, and you begin to understand him.

He and his rookie partner, Richie Curran, receive a case about an entire family living in Brianstown (formerly Broken Harbour) assaulted in their own home. The father and the two little children are dead; the mother is in critical condition. At first they look at the father, Pat. “You would be amazed at how seldom murder has to break into people’s lives,” Kennedy says. “Ninety nine times out of a hundred, it gets there because they open the door and invite it in.” But of course, nothing is ever that simple.

I would have given Broken Harbour 5 out of 5 stars if not for two things: one, the lyricism of the narration, at times, is at odds with the narrator. In In the Woods, The Likeness, and Faithful Place, Tana French has shown skill in shifting voices. She has been so spot-on that she fades into the background, and her character takes center stage. In Faithful Place, for example, I truly believed I am listening to Frank Mackey and not to a woman named Tana French. In Broken Harbour, there are times when I hear Tana French instead of Scorcher Kennedy.

Two, Richie Curran. Richie, Richie, Richie. Richie, a man in his 20s, belonging to a generation obsessed with social networking, who does not understand that people lie about their life online in order to feel better. So let’s say he’s not interested in social networking. (He may have mentioned this in the novel.) Let’s say he only goes online to check his mail. I mean, he doesn’t even know what a “troll” is (though Scorcher knows). But he’s a detective, a cop – how can he not understand that people lie to other people all the time, everywhere, not just online, to feel better about themselves? It’s not a hard thing to understand, Richie!

But despite these frustrations, I couldn’t stop reading. It’s a page-turner with sharp dialogues and smart twists and turns. Tana French once again explores the same themes of Faithful Place – childhood heartaches, nostalgia, the unique insanity and instabilities of a family, the impossibility of completely escaping a broken place – and she does it well. Once again.

I’m still a fan, and I am already waiting for her next book.

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Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a novel made up of six interconnected stories that take us from the distant past to the distant future: The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (c 1850), Letters from Zedelghem (1931), Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (1975), The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (21st century), An Orison of Sonmi~451 (near future), and Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After (distant future).

Other books that remind me of Cloud Atlas include A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham. Both books, like Cloud Atlas, are made up of interconnected short stories, and experiment with language and genre, and explore the passage of time and its effect on faith and memory. But the stories in Egan’s and Cunningham’s novels end before the next one begins. Egan, in fact, has published some of the stories as stand-alone tales before the novel was completed.

Mitchell, on the other hand, truncates his stories at a crucial point, and continues them after all the halves of the five stories are presented (the sixth story, in the middle of the book, is presented as a whole). It makes for an interesting reading experience – a la Finnegan’s Wake, but more approachable. The structure also makes Cloud Atlas a genuine page-turner instead of simply a collection of stories that happened to feature the same characters and which (not to hit on Egan or Cunningham) you could set aside for a while and pick up later, as you would an anthology. How could you leave it behind, if you’re left with a cliffhanger five times?

I love this novel. It’s one of those novels that I love so much it makes me furious – because I wish I have written it, or at least have thought of the structure. If it sounds “gimmicky” to you, don’t worry: it’s not all gimmick. It’s a genuinely beautiful story about six lives that stand helpless against the passage of time.

If you find out the outcome of a certain action thousands of years into the future, and the outcome is not as rosy as you’d hoped, does it negate that action? Does it make that action, which turned out to be nothing but a small drop, worthless? But what is an ocean but a multitude of drops, says Adam Ewing, and maybe he’s right.

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