Music Round Up: Vanessa Peters, Modeste Hugues, Mags McCarthy, Lia Sampai and More

 

Vanesa Peters

Modern Age

★★★★

 

Ahh! A full-throated, toss-the-head-back and let-‘er-rip female vocalist. Vanessa Peters has won praise before on this blog for her Foxhole Prayers release, and Modern Age is another winner. This Covid-delayed release–she and husband/bandmate Rip Rowan were in Italy when things shut down–was worth the wait. Maybe the final track “Still GotTime” says it all: Well, get a hold of yourself/’Cause the world isn’t ending yet. Modern Age is a high-octane release. Peters opens big with the title track, a memory song and a lamentation on current values–As soon as it’s made, it gets thrown away–and a call to get back to things that matter. Peters occasionally lets the production get the better of her–there’s too much going on in “Make up My Mind”–but she has the capacity to smash through any mix when she puts her mind to it. For instance, she punches through the thump, thump percussion of “Crazymaker” and orchestrates the mix on “Never Really Gone.” There’s a Patty Griffin vibe to “The Weight of This” and a soulful-without-being-soul feel to “Valley of the Ashes.” I really liked this record, though it could use more change of pace such as we hear in “The Band Played On,” but the energy… the voice…

 

Sakili

Creole Sounds from the Indian Ocean

★

 

 

 

I’ve always enjoyed hearing Cajun and Creole music live because of its rumbustious ardor and its invitation to bust loose. It is, however, a difficult genre to capture on recordings. When we listen, we hear sloppiness. I was curious to see what Sakili would bring to the table. The trio is from Rodrigues Island, a speck that’s part of Mauritius, which lies 350 miles to the west. Their Creole Sounds from the Indian Ocean is aptly named in that they speak a pidgin French/English blend and draw upon various musical styles: polkas, waltzes, two-steps, mazurkas, East African traditions…. They are not, however, for all tastes. Two tracks will allow you to decide what you think. “Mové piti” is a simple tune with hand drum, box guitar, and accordion, the latter driving the melody. It evinces a beach party more than a studio production. Also try “Flanbwayan Laval” from the linked live show in Brussels. You can see the vibe they’re after, but the vocals are occasionally sour and the composition more jam than polish. I’m sorry to say that Sakili quickly lost my interest. 

 

Modeste Hugues and Kilema

Green World: Songs from Madagascar

★★★ ½ 

 

 

 

I couldn’t help but compare the previous release to this one. The title is meant to be taken literally. These two gentlemen hail from the big East African island of Madagascar. Large is no protection against climate change, the subject of many of their songs. It might be a good thing if you don’t speak Malagasy or hear the French buried in the instrumentation, as the sunny nature of the melodies is a respite from the seriousness of their themes. “Ala mainstro” is a blend of soft lead vocals from Hugues with contrasting the sharper toned but precisely fingered zither from Kilema. The combination produces a swaying, hypnotic sensation. The instrumentation in “Tambanivolo” has a rain-like quality and the groove so smooth that it’s easy to lose yourself in it and fail to notice that Hugues and his guitar lie in wait and unleash short, subtle runs and barres that texture the piece. “Holy hiroro” is an instrumental with a resonant and redundant opening, but the composition commands careful listening as it gets richer in small steps. “Kaseseky” is another in the same vein. The only downside is that this recording can sound like much of a muchness if swallowed whole. But there is no denying the duo’s skill and professionalism.

 

 

Short Cuts:

 

Mags McCarthy is Irish and plays the fiddle, but she made the leap from Cork to Nashville, where she is trying to gain traction as a country performer. If verve alone can do the job, hers is a name to watch. Her video for “Bump” won’t win any PC awards, but is has so much high octane that it threatens to combust. There’s also just enough Celtic flair to it to make it unique in a town of sound-alikes. Ditto her cover of Dolly Parton’s “Light of aClear Blue Morning.” The cow milking in this video is no gimmick; she grew extracting fluids from bovines. If you still doubt the power of her voice, “Strong Enough” ought to convince you. We still have Dolly, though, so one hopes McCarthy will be comfortable being Mags instead.

 

It’s late summer, but if you like pensive music, check out Baluji Shrivastav and his Voice of Flowers: Spring Ragas from India. This 70-year-old Indian/British musician has been an exemplar of musical distinction for so long that he was awarded an MBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). If you’re not familiar with ragas, they are a classical Indian form that is formal in structure but allow for improvisation. Such pieces take their time to take shape and are not for the impatient. Shrivastav is a master of sitar, dilruba (a bowed sitar), surbahar (bass sitar), and various percussion instruments. Try tracks such as “Raga Shuddha Vasant (Ecstasy of Spring)” or “Celebration” and see where they take you. He often put me in mind of the late Ravi Shankar.

 

If you like glorious female voices, you’ll love Barcelona’s Lia Sampai. Her recent EP Amagatalls de Ilum translates “Light Hiding Places” and comes from “La Nina,” a song she penned with musical partner Adrià Pagès (guitar). It is a fragile, sometimes sad, ditty about a girl hiding in the light and longing to break free. It is a metaphor for becoming a woman and ends on a happy note. Try also the joyful “LaCaixeta” in which we hear Sampai’s bell-like vocals, percussive thumps from Pagès that give way to skillful melody lines on Spanish guitar, and (eventually) a circle of hand clapping to accompany Sampai’s dramatic and intimate vocals. Hers is a clear, powerful voice that will stay with you long after the last note fades. 

 

 Rob Weir

WÖR: Artist of the Month August 2021

 

WÖR

About Towers

Naxos

 

Let’s travel to Belgium for our artist of the month. WÖR–I think it’s Flemish for “word,” but you try finding a Flemish-to-English dictionary–is a quintet that does retro music. Its new release About Towers is subtitled “New Energy for Old Belgian Music.” By that they mean, really old; an earlier album was titled Back to the 1780s. They are so retro that even though some of their music sounds faintly Celtic or even ambient in a New Age sort of way, all 14 tracks on About Towers have been arranged for chamber music and one tracked it titled “Aria.” The closest analogous band in recent memory that pops to mind is the now-defunct French ensemble Malicorne, which was anchored by Gabriel Yacoub and recorded on Elektra, which was gobbled up in 2004 .  

 

WÖR is an all-instrumental outfit that amplifies instruments that don’t conventionally go together: banjo, nylon-string guitar, accordion, fiddle, Flemish bagpipes, musette, and baritone and soprano saxophones. Electrification allows softer instruments to compete with the brass, but it also allows WÖR to bend pitches. For instance, on “Beyaert.” Pietererjan Van Kerckhoven’s pipes evoke a hurdy gurdy and Breton music, though neither is the case. In another what-are-we-really-hearing scenario, banjo and guitar notes sound like gentle rain on “Ketting,” but the soprano sax like a recorder. The piece is a chamber music/court dance mashup until Fabio Di Meo comes in with robust baritone sax and Joroen Goegebuer lets loose with some unrestrained fiddling. Yet the same piece is like numerous WÖR compositions in that it takes us from pastoral to lively and back to pastoral. Whenever WÖR need to anchor compositions in ways that many bands do with bass or percussion, they turn to the baritone sax or amped foot stomps.

 

“Climate March” is indeed a march, but a layered one. It’s not really a suite, but its structure suggests one. Another in a similar vein is “Jolies Filles,” which is drifting in a good way. As I type this, summer is winding down a bit but “Jolies Filles” put me in mind of celebrating the lightness of spring. It’s like the flip side of “Ketting” in that it unfolds slowly, gathers pace, tamps down the tempo, then builds it up again. Another I really liked is the soothing “Cecilia.” Jonas Scheys’ banjo rings like a bell and Bert Ruymbeek’s accordion sprays are as sweet as those from the musette. (The musette is not blown like many bagpipes and this makes it more akin to an oboe than to, say, the Highland bagpipes.)

 

Towers is a breath of fresh air at a time in which too many bands sound alike or draw from the same bag of tricks. At present there are a limited number of audio/video clips from the new album, but if you’d like to get a sense of what WÖR sounds like live, try “Marcel” from the 2016 Shetland Folk Festival, a live performance of “VB7ibis,” or a clip from Folk at the Froize. These three sets are not on “Towers” and have more stage energy, but they give an idea of the styles and compositional twists from this talented Belgian band.   

 

Rob Weir

Interior Chinatown Brilliant and Moving

 

INTERIOR CHINATOWN (2020)

By Charles Yu

Pantheon Books, 271 pages.

★★★★★

 

 

Charles Yu won the National Book Award for Interior Chinatown, an honor well deserved. This book is many things: a tragedy, a black comedy, a love story, a script, a family saga, a character study, an extended metaphor, and an imaginative work that blurs fiction and reality. Somewhat controversially, it’s also a backdoor poke at the Black Lives Matter movement in that it communicates complaints from yellow, red, brown, working class, and female Americans collectively crying out, “What about us?”

 

Lest you think the last remark insensitive, consider Yu’s novelistic device. He follows the trials, temporary triumphs, and return to travail of Willis Wu, a Chinese-American actor who eventually lands bit roles and a short-lived part in a TV series titled Black and White. It’s one of those ubiquitous shows/movies/plays in which a white and black character are thrown together, crack denigrating jokes, and eventually discover their common humanity. Think as you wish about the premises of such productions; Yu’s goal is to remind us that Asians are often dumped into stereotypical baskets. His character grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown and both of his parents were also actors. Willis details the kind of roles they performed, a veritable stock character sampler whose labels say it all: Generic Asian Man, Pretty Oriental Flower, Background Oriental Man, Young Dragon Lady, Waiter, Old Asian Woman, Wizened Chinese Man, Kung Fu Master…. The last of these, in Wu’s mind, is the ultimate status, a shorthand for saying the character is respected and feared. He longs to become “Kung Fu Guy.”

 

The author trades in stereotypes for the purpose of shedding light on them. Yu divides his novel into seven “acts,” as much of the book is written as if it were script material from Black and White, a show in which those of other hues are either invisible or exist only to accentuate the show’s title—as if America is biracial rather than multiracial. It’s all very confusing for Willis, who only knows he’s “yellow” when someone points it out to him. It becomes even more baffling when his actress girlfriend (and later, wife) Karen Lee gets the same treatment, though she is staggeringly beautiful and appears ethnically ambiguous. It’s not a reveal to say that all of this serves to undermine the most enduring Asian stereotype, the “model minority.” It would be difficult to be a harder worker than Willis, but worldly success is another matter.

 

As in many novels, Yu gives us a multivalent title. That is, his “interior” Chinatown can be understood as a geographical location, a set of historical circumstances, a locus of memory, mental baggage, and a ball and chain he can’t loosen. It’s no wonder that Willis has a love/hate relationship with Chinatown. It’s a place where his ethnicity is accepted, but if he accepts it in return, he can’t be fully “American.” Imagine the burden and imagine again the toll it could exact.

 

Actually, you don’t have to; Yu’s tale will spell it out for you. He’ll even offer some easy-to-digest sociological theory to add depth. Yu peppers his work with quotes from Erving Goffman (1922-82), a symbolic interactionist scholar who studied rituals, social dramaturgy, and signs long before they became fashionable. Goffman’s appearance signals (if I might!) that among the things that dazzled the National Book Award committee is that Yu’s book doesn’t fit snuggly into conventional fiction pigeonholes. As noted above, some of it is written as script material from Black and White, but it’s also peppered with quotes, court case material, and invented-but-rings-true dialogue. Overall, it reads as a template for what stream of consciousness writing ought to be rather than the incomprehensible mess it too often is.

 

Apply any descriptor you wish. Interior Chinatown is an important book, a beautifully written one, an emotional experience, and an unforgettable journey.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Klara and the Sun: Another Brilliant Ishiguro Novel

KLARA AND THE SUN (2021)

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Random House/Penguin, 307 pages

★★★★★

 

 

 

There are reasons why Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro has won most of the major awards a novelist can, including the Whitbread, the Arthur C. Clarke, the Man Booker, and a Nobel. He manages to be an amazing stylist without being pretentious, and he never repeats himself thematically. Consider just a few of his subjects: the Sino-Japanese War (When We Were Orphans), the British aristocracy (Remains of the Day), and a dystopian in which children are raised to become organ donors (Never Let Me Go).

 

In Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro turns to what we construe to be the very near future. AI (Artificial Intelligence) has reached advanced levels, and genetic engineering has become commonplace. The titular character is an AF (Artificial Friend), which are all the rage as companions for children bred for superior intellect. Klara has not yet found a home because she’s an older model. There’s something about her, though, that attracts the eye of young Josie, who doesn’t have many friends other than Rick, who has never been “lifted” and comes from a difficult family situation. In addition, Josie’s sister, Sal, is deceased. Chrissie, Josie’s ambitious mother, wants her daughter to get one of the sleek new B3 models, but Josie insists on buying Klara.

 

For an android like Klara, the Sun is godlike, as it replenishes her batteries. She’s a bundle of wires and programming capable of high-level thinking, but Klara is essentially a child, as she knows little of the world except what she observed through the store display window. You will be charmed by Klara, how she learns, what she “feels,” and her skewed look at the world–phones are “oblongs,” for example, and she misreads illogical social situations. Among Klara’s impressions is that the “Cootings Machine”–the name on a piece of construction equipment–is evil and environmentally destructive.

 

Klara is an excellent AF to Josie, who is often ill, perhaps as Chrissie fears, mortally so. We also learn that Chrissie’s ex-husband, Paul, has concerns about how his daughters have been raised. He comes off as a cross between a hippie, a survivalist, and a Luddite, but maybe he’s not a naïf. He is particularly concerned when Chrissie begins taking Josie to a painter named Calpaldi, who also did Sal’s portrait before she died. Is more than painting taking place inside his studio?

 

Klara and the Sun is a fascinating exploration of “humanity.” The novel reminded me of a Star Trek Next Generation episode titled “The Measure of a Man” in which scientist Bruce Maddox wishes to disassemble Data to see if he can be replicated. After all, Data is just a “machine.” Is Klara just a “’bot?” How do we measure humanity? Klara learns, is self-aware, and her programmed emotions are often superior to those fired by biological receptors and neurons. What about GMOs like Josie? Does live birth make her more human than a manufactured sentient being? Once DNA is altered, is a biological child still fully human? Who cares more for Josie: her status-obsessed mother, or a robot who implores the Sun to heal Josie and engages in an unusual escapade she thinks will help? When Calpaldi opines that, “there’s nothing so unique” about humans that “our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, and transfer,” is he offering a dose of harsh truth, or setting the stage for the end of the Anthropocene?

 

What a book! Even if you think you don’t like science fiction, Ishiguro will take you on an intellectual journey that raises many questions and trusts readers to answer them. Many years ago, novelist Philip K. Dick queried whether androids had souls in the ways humans conceptualized them. If consciousness is a measure, Ishiguro suggests that placing robots in the service of a biological species might be a form of enslavement. Is it okay to discard/dismantle a robot whose neural networks continue to function? In our time, much has been about climate change, plague, and war. Maybe this is our version of Data’s dilemma and Calpaldi’s assertion.

 

As only the most confident writers can do, Ishiguro prefers open-ended possibilities to dogmatism. If, however, we believe what AI boosters say, the conundrums Ishiguro posits are ones that will soon jump from the pages of science fiction and into the realms of ethics and politics– two “human” pursuits that historically have not been good friends, AF or biological.

 

Rob Weir

Moonflower Murders Too Long and complex, Yet Rewarding

 

 

 

THE MOONFLOWER MURDERS: MAGPIE MURDERS BOOK 2 (2020)

By Anthony Horowitz

Harper, 608 pages.

★★★★

 

You know you’re in for a complex mystery when the word murder appears in the plural. This one delivers in more ways than one, as it’s also a murder mystery novel that takes us inside another fictional murder mystery.

 

Susan Ryeland is living in Crete, where she runs a boutique hotel with her life/business partner Andreas Patakis. She’s there because she quit her publishing job after the death of Alan Conway, the author of Atticus Pund Takes a Case. He was an unpleasant part of her roster of clients and she wase happy to put that life behind her. If only the hotel wasn’t shedding money like autumn leaves.

 

As fate would have it, Lawrence Treherne offers her $10,000 to come to Sussex as his guest at Branlow Hall, an upscale hotel that puts hers to shame. She naturally wants to know how she, a former publisher, can possibly assist in finding his missing daughter Cicely. Treherne is convinced that the answer lies in Conway’s book, which his daughter was reading when she disappeared, and that Susan can decode it better than anyone. Her curiosity is piqued when she is told that Alan died in the same room in the Mayflower wing of the hotel in which Frank Parris was murdered. Although a Romanian staff member, Stefan Codrescu, was convicted that murder, Treherne thinks maybe Stefan is innocent, though he’s vague on why. It is curious, though, that Parris was killed the very day of Cecily’s in-house wedding.

 

To say that Susan knows her way around a case of souvlaki better than a murder case is an understatement. It doesn’t help that she knows Richard Locke, the detective who investigated Parris’s murder and Cecily’s disappearance, and the two despise each other. That’s pretty much the case with everyone she meets: Treherne’s wife; his older daughter Lisa, who runs the hotel and sees Susan as a sponge; Eloise, the nanny to Cecily’s daughter Roxanna; the Wilsons, who  retained possession of a house Parris wanted to sell; Alan’s ex-wife Melissa, whom he left when he came out as gay; Cicely’s husband Aiden MacNeil; and several others, including the spa and night managers. The plot thickens when Susan learns that Parris served as Alan’s introduction to gay life. Maybe Susan needs to re-read Alan’s novel, which she is loathe to do because she hated it the first time around.

 

The Moonflower Murders is multifaceted–even “The Marriage of Figaro” factors in–which is both a strength and a weakness. As Susan begins to take stock of motives, including who was sleeping with whom, she increasingly feels like she either needs to go back to Andreas or return to publishing–anything except be at Branlow Hall around so many awful people. Just about everyone is a suspect. The only thing she knows for certain is that no one is telling the unvarnished truth and for the life of her, she cannot see how two deaths eight years apart are related to a young mother’s disappearance. For all she can fathom, maybe Cicely is dead and everyone she met had a hand in it. Or perhaps Cicely decided to leave motherhood and her awful family behind and move somewhere like Crete!

 

In a book as multilayered as The Moonflower Murders, logic holes and improbabilities are perhaps inevitable. There are several such moments in the novel and I was not the first to think that several were

unconvincingly contrived. Plus, I always furl my brow when solving a puzzle rests upon obscure clues that require preternatural prescience to consider, let alone identify as key. Horowitz compensates for plot head-scratchers through strong character development. Trust me when I say you will meet numerous hard-to-digest people in this book. Trust me also when I say it’s hard to look away.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

  

 

What Do You Mean?

 

 

 

As former students can attest, I am a bear about precise wording. For example, I never let history students use the term “American people” and insisted they identify which Americans they meant: men, women, white people, people of color, upper-class Americans, the middle class, working people….

 

In that vein, I have some vocabulary reform suggestions. I'd ban making verbs from perfectly good nouns such as priority or conference. In fact, I support criminal penalties for all business speak. But let's start with a few other words.

 

·      Let’s lose the F-bomb. Nothing says pathetic hipster or junior high school boy like a splatter of F-bombs. The word has become so boorish that it’s used to describe everything except having sex.

 

·      Stop confusing the words hero and victim. If a firefighter risks life and limb to carry someone from a burning building, that's heroic. If the same person perishes with a hose in hand battling a blaze set by an arsonist, that firefighter is a victim. Heroism is a conscious act; victimization is not.

 

·      I've grown suspicious of the label activist, especially when self-applied. Activists place their lives and liberty on the line to redress grievances. Those who lobby elected officials, sign petitions, post on social media, or carry protest signs are not activists; they’re citizens.

 

·      My personal sample is just two, but do you see a groundswell of urgency among people with physical challenges to be called differently abled? The two folks I know well definitely see themselves as disabled and scoff at terms that suggest otherwise.

 

·      I read a lot of literature from indigenous writers. I'm betting if you gave most of them and their constituencies a choice between being called: (A) Native Americans, or (B) Indians, (B) would win in a landslide.

 

·      Can we please make a distinction between racists and fools? Not everything that upsets someone is racist. I recently saw a post from someone–okay, a fool–who insists that the word “jimmies,” as in ice cream sprinkles, is racist because it disrespectfully references blackness. Ummm… they're made of chocolate, not licorice, and it would be an amazing stretch to connect jimmies to something like Jim Crow. As Tom Lehrer once remarked, “If you’ve got nothing to say, the least you can do is shut up about it.”

 

·      Along similar lines, I pay more attention when a person of color uses the term “racist” than when it comes from some privileged white person from tony suburbs.

 

·      The word stupidity knows no racial or class boundaries. It’s not racist or classist to call out African-Americans, Latinos, or poor rural whites for being resistant to being vaccinated against Covid. Sadly, the vax rate among all three is low. That was structural at first–not enough access–but that has given way to paranoia about not trusting the government or the vaccine. Yes, I know about the Tuskegee experiments, thalidomide, and other such horrors, but this isn't the same situation. If there was any validity to assertions that the vaccine is dangerous or a plot to eliminate people of color, the streets would already be littered with deformed white corpses. History should never be an excuse not to flip the calendar forward.

 

·      In the same groove, when did the word rights cease being enumerated Constitutional privileges and mutate into wingnut libertarianism? Rights are not a synonym for the liberty of individuals to do whatever they please. Anyone who thinks they have a “right” to eschew Covid-19 shots is a bio-terrorist. Under what precept of law, civil society, or morality is it acceptable for individuals to jeopardize public health just because they feel like it? If this nonsense continues, I can guarantee another lockdown, probably with an attendant economic collapse. It's time to reclaim what John Dewey called the Great Community. An anti-vaxer has only the right to stay at home. Get vaccinated or no school, no job, no travel. I recall my boyhood when nurses came into my grade school, students lined up, and each got a polio jab. There was no discussion.

 

·      A hoax is something that's not objectively, demonstrably, or scientifically true. It's not the same as something you simply don't wish to believe. To those who think Covid or climate change is a hoax, I can only say I hope the little green men in the Mothership treat you well.

 

·      Religious tolerance must either be universal or abandoned. It cannot, for example, be filtered through a Southern Baptist value system. The founders of the United States knew the history of the Inquisition, the wars of religion, witch trials, and “official” religions. That’s why the Constitution specifies Congress can make “no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Liberals are often as bad, if not worse, than conservatives. If you're one of those with a knee-jerk acceptance of all Muslim beliefs, but ridicule Christians and make Antisemitic remarks, you are merely a bigot with different targets.

 

·      To end on a light note, gardening is agronomy aimed at maximizing the growth of flowers, fruits, and vegetables. People like me are Darwinian scatterers who believe if a plant survives, it was fit enough to do so on its own.

 

Rob Weir

We Begin at the End Complex but Rewarding

 

 

We Begin at the End (2020)

By Chris Whitaker

Henry Holt and Company, 370 pages.

 

Did you ever have a childhood friend, lose touch, and meet again decades later? The first thing that runs through your mind is whether the kid you recall still resides within the adult standing before you. That's the dilemma facing Chief Walker – known to most simply as “Walk”– who now keeps the peace in a small California town near Anaheim. He has never believed that his best buddy, Vincent King, was guilty though he's been in prison since being adjudicated as an adult at age15 for the killing of seven–year–old Sissy Radley.

 

Thirty years later, Vincent is out of jail. Almost immediately, though, he is the prime suspect in the death of Star Radley. There's nothing neat in any part of Chris Whitaker's novel. Everybody either has something to hide or suffering from some deep-seated hurt. The Radley clan isn't exactly a collection of upright citizens. Star was a woman of loose virtue, a drunkard, a stripper, and the rough sex lover of club owner/his developer Dickie Darke, Walk’s chief suspect. Star has also left behind a daughter, Duchess, a foul-mouthed 13-year-old, who calls herself “Outlaw” and tries to act and think like one. 

 

Walk, though, has issues of his own: he's a widower, is emotionally shut down, has been unlucky in the dating scene, and is trying to hide the fact that he has Parkinson's disease. He feels protective of Duchess, in part because his father-in-law's deceased wife was Star’s sister. Outlaw, of course, thinks she needs no one and balks at Walk’s attempt to send her to live with her grandfather.

 

Walk isn’t getting anywhere with an investigation he’s not even supposed to undertake. All of the evidence points directly at Vincent, as State Police remind him. Walk refuses to accept that, but it is patently obvious he continues to see his friend through a 15-year-old’s eyes. Vincent is taciturn, doesn’t insist he’s innocent, won’t say much about his whereabouts when Star was killed, and doesn’t appear to care very much about his fate. Even Milton, the local butcher, testifies he overheard a heated argument between Star and Vincent. Also hanging over Vincent’s head is that he killed another inmate during a prison brawl. To top it off, he wants Martha May to defend him, and that’s pretty messy; she specializes in family law and is one of Walk’s former girlfriends. Even she is receptive to the idea that Vincent might be just what he seems: a cold-hearted murderer.

 

But Walk can't hear any of that. He immediately thinks Darke got to Milton, and begins to poke his nose into Darke’s finances, his real estate dealings, and an offer to buy Vincent’s land. Walk has so many irons in the fire he’d have to be the Hindu goddess Durga to hold them all. Add another arm when Milton’s bloated body is pulled from the water. Walk unearths some shocking secrets about Milton, but that doesn’t make him a perjurer. Nonetheless, Walk again casts his suspicions toward Darke.

 

Believe me when I say I've only uncoiled several of the loosely bound serpentine kinks in a novel that is equal parts a murder mystery, psychological investigation, and thriller.

Whitaker gets credit for understanding that criminal cases are seldom cut and dried. He also knows enough to steer clear of easy answers, black and white morality, and omniscient investigators. We come to imagine that Walk is really trying to recover his own 15-year-old self to deal with his discomfort with adult life, but is that so? I will say only that the book wends its way toward a towards a shocking and surprising ending that's not entirely of the happy-ever-after variety.

 

Complexity is the strength and perhaps a curse of We Begin at the End. There are many characters, motives, and personae to be juggled. In essence, Whitaker has constructed a thinking person’s puzzle that some readers may find akin to one of those 12,000-piece jigsaws that sits on library tables and takes a village to assemble. It’s not always a breezy read, but in my estimation, it’s worth plowing through. Whitaker is a very good writer who diverts our attention elsewhere when he tiptoes toward the melodramatic. He is also skillful enough that we often forget that the book’s structure is circular. He tricks us again with a title that can and should be taken several ways.

 

Many psychologists claim that our basic personalities are formed during childhood, though they generally fudge that assertion by noting that moral development comes a bit later. So, do we “know” a 45-year-old who was our best friend at 15? Don't be sure that you do. Don't be sure that you don't!

 

Rob Weir