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| E. L. Doctorow |
Periodically I like to
look back into the canon of a writer I admire and usually find gems lurking in
their past, as well as a glimpse into the accomplished writer they’ve become.
In this case, the great E. L. Doctorow, who sadly passed away recently, and
Colum McCann, perhaps E.L.’s successor, as both write powerfully compelling
fiction within historical context. As it turns out, both novels had at their
core a mystery – a mystery of disappearance, a mystery of identities, as well
as the greater mysteries of the universe – and both begin in NYC more than a
hundred years ago. Add to this mix a first-time, self-published novelist
weaving a thriller set in the months after 9/11, which might be said to be
fictional history in the making.
WATERWORKS by Doctorow
takes place in the years following the Civil War in NYC. Narrated by a
newspaper editor, a man with a nose for a story and an abundance of compassion,
he goes in search of a missing freelancer with a complicated family history,
who seems to have disappeared in search of his father, previously deceased. Or
was he? And why are orphans and children on city streets suddenly disappearing?
Told in Doctorow’s signature exquisite prose, and profound insights, this
mystery is as old as the human race: what does it mean to be human and how do
we defeat death? At the core of the mystery, an enigmatic physician who reminds
me a little of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Moriarty. Add an unusually sensitive policeman,
a clergyman with his own secrets, and the women and children who become
collateral damage. Literary mystery at its best, with many insights into the
early days of journalism and the darker side of politics and society in late
19th century NYC.
“Our high-speed rotaries had come along around 1845, and from that
moment the amount of news a paper could print, and the number of papers
competing, suggested the need for a self-history of sorts, a memory file of our
work. So that we needn’t always spin our words out of nothing. At the Telegram
this enterprise was first put in charge of an old man down in the basement,
whose genius it was to lay one day’s edition on top of another, flat, in wide
oak cabinet drawers, which he kept immaculately polished. Only when the war
came, and it became apparent to the publisher that salable books could be made
of collections of war pieces from the paper, did cross-reference filing begin
in earnest. Now we had three or four young men sitting down there with scissors
and paste pots who were never more than a month or two behind – fifteen New
York dailies a day were dropped on their tables, after all…”
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| Colum McCann |
THIS SIDE OF BRIGHTNESS
by Column McCann takes place in NYC at the turn of the century when subway
tunnels were first burrowed by what became known as the Sandhogs – Irish and
Italian immigrants, free black men, who spent their days, and many years, below
concrete digging for a living and hoping to stay alive. Three generations
later, a subset of the homeless community – their descendants – dwell in the
remnants of those digging stations, above and beside the trains. The
contrapuntal nature of their tales, and lives, is a signature style of
storytelling for McMann, best known for the extraordinary “Let the Great World
Spin” and more recently “Transatlantic.” Of Irish descent, his prose has the
lilt of a poet and the descriptive clarity of Doctorow. From the optimism and
hope of the building of a great city to the despair of those trapped in the
rubble, this novel is spellbinding. And the mystery? Well, who is who and how
did they get there? Most interesting to me was the title: McCann chose to focus
on the light, where he might have called the book, The Cartography of Darkness…
“He opens his eyes, looks at the graph paper, the rows of dots and the
squiggled lines. He draws a quick ordnance survey profile of where he has
walked. This is his most important ritual he cannot start his day without it.
He exaggerates the features to ten times their map size, so that, on the paper,
the next looks like a rumple of huge valleys and mountains and plains. Even the
tiniest nicks in the wall become craters. Later he will transfer them to a
larger map he has been working on for the past four years, a map of where he
lives, hand-drawn, intricate, secretive, with hills, rivers, ox-bow lakes,
curved creeks, shadows: the cartography of darkness.“
“Consequence” by Steve
Masover, takes place in the shadow of 9/11, a techno-thriller with a focus on
the northern California Bay area counterculture and general global instabilities.
Not so much mystery or history as socio-political fiction in which a group of
idealistic and disenchanted environmental activists struggle to maintain
integrity and personal relationships as they drift into the more dangerous territory
of techno/eco-terrorism. What begins as concerns about genetically modified
organisms [GMO] in our plant life, their battle takes on more ominous tones. Although
Masover peppers the early narrative with a heavy dose of techno-speak more
suitable to hackers, the narrative takes off as the community of self-anointed
Knights takes center stage. He also weaves in romance, artistic metaphor, parental
conflicts and the essence of communal living, all timely and relevant. The
mystery? Who will prevail and at what cost? The writing is neither Doctorow nor
McCann, he needs a few more books under his belt for that honor, but
sufficiently skilled to have found a good publisher. Nevertheless, thanks to
self-publishing technology, you can order a print copy online or e-read.
