Night of the Living Rez

 

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ (2022)

By Morgan Talty

Tin House, 278 pages.

★★★

 

 

 

Night of the Living Rez is the debut work from Penobscot author Morgan Talty. It consists of 12 linked short stories narrated by David—nicknamed Dee–as a youth, an adolescent, and a young man. It is mostly set on a Penobscot reservation in Maine.

 

Before going further, let me say that indigenous writers should be free to tell their stories as they see fit. There are, however, disconnects for non-indigenous readers. Talty often uses non- or barely-translated Penobscot terms. Given that Talty opts for phonetic spellings, it is very difficult to find out more from online Penobscot dictionaries. Many readers, though, may experience more difficulty in making the links that Talty intends because of the book’s short-story format. Had it been a linear novel, the timeframes in which the stories unfold would be easier to locate. More importantly, we could more easily trace David’s evolution.

 

David’s mother left her non-Native husband and has taken up with Frick, who is a bundle of contradictions. He serves as a teacher of what he thinks of as the old ways, though it’s clear that reservation (“rez”) youth and a considerable part of its adult population are more modern (and troubled) than traditional. That includes Frick, who struggles with alcohol. When a strange container (“In a Jar”) shows up under the doorstep Frick declares it “bad medicine,” smudges the entire house, and pins “good” medicine bundles on David, his pregnant sister Paige, and his partner. They mostly think it itches and abandon them. He is often a good step-dad, but sometimes a bad one prone to taking off. When angry he calls David, “little white-boy,” a slam on his paternity. The overall image is that Frick would like to be a Native version of Superman, but he’s too flawed on a personal level and stuck in a bygone values system he can’t maintain even for himself. Traditional ways show up mainly in residual folk beliefs in sprites and spirits, but their mentions appear more reflexive than serious.

 

There is humor interspersed in the collection, especially in the opening tale “Burn.” David is an adolescent in this one who hangs out with his methadone center buddy Fellis. One winter’s night Fellis falls asleep on his way home and his hair is frozen to the ice. The only way to free him is for David to cut off his hair. He remarks, “I never thought I’d scalp a fellow tribe member.” Funny, but also emblematic of a rez filled with social problems of many varieties.

 

As we later learn, by the time he has left childhood—after quitting school—David lives with Fellis and his mother. David’s own mother has many problems of her own, including a seizure disorder, but from Talty’s telling, just about everyone struggles on the rez, be it from discrimination, lack of money, booze, or drugs. Especially the latter. This includes David, who joins Fellis and other mates JP (Jay Pitch) and Tyson in popping pills, including Ativan and “pins” (Klonopin). The drug of choice on the rez is tobacco. Smoking begins in childhood and most of it in the form of cigarettes rather than in rituals. David also engages in some adolescent hijinks such as breaking a bar window, but mostly avoids the serious transgressions of out-of-control Fellis such as serious assaults or a failed robbery of the reservation’s museum whose objective was to sell tribal artifacts to Antiques Roadshow.

 

It is not until near the end of the book that we learn of a deeper source of David’s pain, but he would have had a hard life even without that trauma. On the rez there’s not enough of anything except distress. Meals are often either fast food or scavenged foods such as fiddleheads and moose meat. It’s where people hunt porcupines to sell to a woman who harvests the quills for ceremonial costumes. How’s that for irony? Desperate people need the $20 that she uses to make vestments that honor Native life. In the moving story “Earth Speak” an older David writes, “this reservation was for the dead.”

 

Night of the Living Rez is probably funnier to insiders than me, but it’s hard not to note that the book’s title is a spinoff of the 1968 George Romero movie Night of the Living Dead. It’s often considered the first modern zombie movie. Make of that what you will.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Summer World Music Listening

 

If you’re like me, summertime is when you throttle down and maybe try a few new things. This column features world music offerings, many of them from musicians based in Barcelona. I justify this by saying that it’s a seacoast city, so if you’re bold you can  load some of these artists onto your favorite music delivery device and give them a metaphorical test drive. Will you like them? Probably not all of them, but why not branch out a little? 

 

 

 

Vanessa Bissiri is Italian, but now lives in Barcelona, a hotbed of contemporary jazz. Hers is sometimes called “neon jazz,” a fusion form that blends the swaying Mediterranean feel of the 1970s with more recent trends. “C’è sempre il mare” is an example. It’s decidedly in the softer “cool jazz” idiom, but her voice hints that she might also be able to walk across the avenue into a pop club and hold her own there. “Se perfuma y toma mast,” which is roughly about a dandy who smells good but drinks, finds Bissini singing in the seams of quirky beats. These are two offerings from her recent album Empatica (“Empathetic”) and are typical of the whole.

 

 

 

For a different Catalán experience try Clavellina D’Aire, the stage name of two music teachers, Cati Plana (diatonic accordion) and Jordi Macaya (viola). They prefer folk stylings, but again in an airy, light style. Their album Musiques per emportar-se a iles desertes translates music to carry away to deserted islands, akin to the similar English idiom. It’s a nonsensical phrase if you truly consider it (where would you get batteries or electricity on a deserted island?), but Clavellina D’Aire could definitely provide some chill-out sounds to help you calm down. I recommend them for relaxing on non-deserted beaches. Try the combo of “Pròleg/La Tosca,” the first café-like and the second brighter and traipsing. If you like their keep-things-simple approach as much as I, you can find a half hour concert on YouTube. Appropriately, they perform in a sunny park with children playing quietly and adults doing nothing much in particular. You can readily see, though, that these are two talented people, something that needs no translation. I especially enjoy the way Macaya flirts with discordant notes without actually crossing over. He also has a capable singing voice I find infectious.  

 

 

 

How about a flamenco guitarist in a highbrow vein? Feliu Gasull has released Pit roig (“red breast”), an album that will have appeal to fellow string wizards. The title track showcases Gasull’s talent. “Caminet” is also typical of his more classical touch. A hora is a circle dance that’s often exuberant. Gasull, though, opts for a quiet approach to “Hora Baixa.” Sample before you purchase, though, as this is cerebral material that won’t be everyone’s cup of chocolate caliente.

 

 

The name Laura Downes might ring a bell for National Public Radio listeners. She hosts the world music show AMPLIFY, on which she sometimes showcases female musicians of color. She is of Jamaican/Russian heritage, was born in San Francisco, and raised in Europe. If you don’t know her, though, don’t expect her own music to bop like Afropop or even come close to rocking out; she’s a classical pianist. Her latest recording, Love at Last, has nearly two dozen tracks but don’t anticipate from their titles. Folk music, for example, is replete with songs titled “Tree of Life,” but none of have the same take as hers. Nor should you expect an offering such as “Blessing” to sound either anthemic or balladic. It’s a frenzied trip up and down the white keys that’s a loosely structured composition that drifts toward atonality. Downes is impressive, though I confess that her work–like Gasull’s–impresses me more than it attracts me.

 

 

 

If you’ve had enough of the quiet stuff, slide into the evening with something that falls into the rowdy and stomping category. Barcelona is, after all, a warm city and Julivert likes its music accordingly. The title track of “A Tamarit” sounds like a big  party is about to break out and as soon as everyone is lubricated, maybe they will ask some Balkan, Cajun, and Roma musicians to join them. “Som de l’oest” hints they will lower the pace. Never fear! The moment fingers touch the fiddle, the temperature rises. If “Bella Ciao” got any more tongue in cheek, lead singer Jordi Suñé  would need a surgeon to dislodge it. Julivert specialize in cançons, high-spirited dances you’d find at a village feast or an Argentinian tavern. Call Julivert—the word means “parsley” by the way–the antithesis of the mannered offerings above. If the music sounds rough around the edges, I suspect they’d have it no other way.

 

 

 

Rob Weir

Old Joy: When Old Friends Fade

 

OLD JOY (2006)

Directed by Kelly Reichardt

Washington Square Films, 76 minutes, not rated (brief dorsal nudity)

★ ½ 

 

 

 

 

Films in the Criterion Collection are usually quality offerings, but not always. I recently saw Old Joy, a Kelly Reichardt offering. She is known for independent movies that are conceptually intriguing. The final products, though, blow hot and cold. ( Meek’s Cutoff is my favorite from her.)

 

Old Joy came two years before Reichardt made her most celebrated movie, Wendy and Lucy. Lucy the dog is also in Old Joy and I exaggerate only slightly when I saw that the pooch has more affect than the two human principals. Mark (Daniel London) is on the eve of fatherhood, when he gets call from old friend Kurt (Will Oldham) wanting to know if he wants to go on a weekend camping and hot spring road trip. It is inferred, though never spelled out, that Kurt is troubled in a mildly depressed manner, but Mark could use a little time to wrap his own head around the change coming in his own life. His wife tells him to go, so he packs the car and takes Lucy along for the outing.

 

Old Joy was made in Oregon. Mark agrees to drive as everything about Kurt, including his rented apartment, his van, and his personal appearance bespeak the term bedraggled. They set up for the Cascades, smoke weed, and get lost a few times, but neither is what you’d call a great conversationalist. They end up spending the night in a tent at the end of a road where household junk has been strewn, find a diner the next morning, get directions, hike into Bagley Hot Springs, soak in the springs (with a bit of ambiguous neck rubbing from Kurt), head back to the city (Portland?), and say their goodbyes. That’s it. The movie is just 76 minutes long but its pace is so labored and lugubrious that it had to stretch to break the one-hour mark. There are several mostly wordless driving POV shots whose major purposes are to emphasize the lack of connection between Mark and Kurt and to spotlight a rather subdued soundtrack from Yo La Tengo.

 

I get what Reichardt wanted to do. Most of us probably have people from our past with whom we were once close. Reunions usually go one of two directions. In the best case scenario it’s like picking up a discussion that began decades earlier as if we were interrupted just yesterday. The sadder result is the realization that the two of you have gone down different paths and there’s no spur road that reconnects them. The title Old Joy says it all. Kurt reminded me of a burnt out Deadhead who thinks that the next hit, song, hot spring, or Burning Man–there’s an oblique reference to it–will resuscitate the sweet bird of youth. Reichardt uses postindustrial physical decay, tired diners, and litter to underscore how the friendship between Mark and Kurt is past its sell-by date. In the end, like Mark we observe that things are old, but not joyful.

 

Old Joy is ultimately a sad film, but it’s simply not a very interesting one. Despite the expanse of the mountain ranges and the lushness of the Pacific rainforest, the movie is claustrophobic. I’m at a loss to see why some critics called it one of the best films of 2006, or why it ended up in the Criterion Collection. Lucy was delightful, though.

 

Rob Weir

The Passenger Overly Engimatic

 

The Passenger (2022)

By Cormac McCarthy

Alfred A. Knopf, 383 pages.

★★

 

  

The publisher calls The Passenger  “a novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin and the madness that is human consciousness.” That’s both accurate and a tip-off. I am not a Cormac McCarthy newbie. I know that his books are neither breezy nor feel-good reading. What McCarthy always gives us is spectacular and sparkling prose. We certainly get that in The Passenger.

 

What we don’t get is any sort of narrative. Bobby Western is the novel’s central character but you won’t initially know that. In one of the most unorthodox openings in recent literary history, The Passenger opens with a scene that could be a Fellini outtake, a surreal dialogue between a female of indeterminate age and a character called The Thalidomide Kid, who waves his flipper to conduct what appears to be an audition for a twisted carnival or vaudeville routine. This chapter is written in italics and, like the entire book, eschews quotation marks and apostrophes. The non-italicized chapters focus on Bobby, but you won’t learn until about halfway through that the other chapters are about his deceased schizophrenic sister Alicia.

 

When we meet Bobby in 1980, he’s a New Orleans-based salvage diver doing a job in Mississippi. His dive discovers an intact submerged private jet with the pilot and eight passengers strapped in their seats. What he doesn’t find is the flight recorder, the pilot’s bag, or any evidence of the ninth passenger who was supposed to be aboard. Don’t wait for the mystery to resolve. Bobby will be surveilled and harassed by men with badges, but we never learn who they are–FBI? CIA? mobsters?–and the crash itself isn’t even a MacGuffin. We never learn what happened to the plane or why Bobby is under suspicion. This makes the novel’s very title a misnomer.

 

We eventually learn that both Bobby and Alicia were child prodigies, she in math and he in physics. Their father worked on the Manhattan project under Robert Oppenheimer. (If you don’t know his tale, he lost his security clearance because his wife once belonged to the Community Party.) Alicia went to the University of Chicago at age 12, and Bobby dropped out of Cal Tech, drove Formula Two racecars in Europe, and drifted into diving. It is strongly suggested that he and his sister were lovers, but like everything else in the novel, the specifics are murky. All we know is that he splits after the IRS seizes his assets (including his Maserati). He is fine living as a bum-like recluse and spends a lot of time musing about guilt, grief, and spirituality.

 

It's hard, though, to get much handle on a guy whose most repeated comment is, “I don’t know.” He has long conversations with the garrulous John Sheddan and a lawyer named Kline, but these exchanges sound profound but go nowhere. This means many of them–including a long discourse on President Kennedy’s assassination posing as received truth–meander but fail to enlighten. It’s no wonder that one reader compared the novel to Kafka’s The Trial and another to an acid trip. The disconnected ping pong-style conversations put me in mind of the Barry Levinson movie Diner (1982) if he had set it in a graduate student lounge.

 

Insofar as I could determine, The Passenger is an exploration of those who simply don’t fit in society and have to decide whether to engage with the world, exit from it, or go solo. Bobby’s engagement attempts are, to say the least, unorthodox. Those with whom he connects the most include a transgender woman,  a conman, roughnecks, drunks, and misfits cut from different cloth than his own.

 

McCarthy’s prose  is the only salvage job that keeps this novel from being scrap. There are spectacular passages in The Passenger that made me wish he had saved them for a better book. His writing is so good that he has devotees who will praise everything he writes whether or not it makes an iota of sense. I’m a McCarthy fan, but not of this book. My best advice is to visit your local library, pluck this volume from the shelf, and plonk yourself down in a comfy chair. Open to a random page, read a few paragraphs, and repeat several times. Return it to the shelf.

 

Rob Weir

 

The Hotel Nantucket: A Summer Beach Read

 

THE HOTEL NANTUCKET (2022)

By Erin Hilderbrand

Little, Brown, & Company, 401 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

Erin Hilderbrand is certainly a regional writer given that most of her 28 books have been set on the island of Nantucket. It’s appropriate that I post this review on the first day of summer, as The Hotel Nantucket is a beach-read novel. Hilderbrand is a mass market writer whose books are more genre-oriented than literary in style. If your preferences run to the latter, you might not be tempted but I can say that it’s more than candy floss. Hilderbrand entertains with heavy-on-relationships books and characters with depth. You won’t like everyone in this novel, but you will get to know them. Another  feature to note is that the book runs 401 pages, but 46 are in the form of a guidebook for those traveling to this tony summer playground. It even comes with a suggested music playlist.

 

The Hotel Nantucket  is about the tensions between the rich and those who cater to them. The novel’s namesake establishment is a faded grand old hotel about to get a serious makeover, courtesy of Xavier Darling, a rich Brit, who sinks $32 million into rehabbing it. His stated goal is to obtain a rare 5-key rating, though he also has an ulterior motive that is yours to discover. Call it a luxury venue on steroids­­­­—a decadent bar, free mini bars that are restocked every three days, artisan-woven blankets and linens, a sauna, a yoga studio, gourmet food, hydrangea blue décor, a requisite ghost, and the expectation that staff must keep the place spotless and kowtow to every customer whim. Darling wants the hotel to be so exclusive that anyone who doesn’t book way in advance can’t stay or eat  there, no matter how fat their wallet.

 

Making this work means hiring the “right” staff, but not necessarily a conventional one. Lizbet Keaton comes aboard as manager and is placed in charge of hiring after dissolving her partnership with her unfaithful boyfriend with whom she ran the island’s most-popular restaurant. Good luck keeping control over exotic gold-digger Alessander Powell, celebrity chef Mario Subacio, shady night auditor Richie Decameron, elderly housekeeper Magda English, or naïve clerk Edie Robbins who is drowning in student debt as well as being blackmailed by her former boyfriend. It’s a crew so fraught with baggage that one of its most stable members is “Long Shot” Chad Winslow, a rich Bucknell kid who takes a job as a maid as self-atonement for a foolish thing he did during a college party. His father, Paul, simply can’t comprehend why he’d debase himself as a maid. There are several out gay characters as well, but none whose motives are transparent.   

 

Darling bribes his staff by handing out weekly bonuses, though it has a boomerang effect of pitting them against each other. But Darling is a determined man, even though he never leaves London. The key to the fifth key, as it were, is to have everything shipshape in case blogger Shelly Carpenter of Hotel Confidential fame pays a visit. That too is a problem; her identity is a better-kept secret than U.S. nuclear codes. This means a staff on edge­—or perhaps “more” on edge since who is sleeping with whom enters the plot—because even a minor slip up like a piece of litter or a misunderstanding with a customer might take place with or in the presence of Carpenter. You can imagine that some of the guests have weird quirks and agendas. There is, to name one, Kimber Marsh who arrives with her chess prodigy son Louie,  inquisitive daughter Wanda, and their pit bull Doug. Marsh insists on stashing a huge amount of money in a hotel safe and withdraws thousands each week to pay their freight in cash. 

 

If this sounds like a potboiler, it is! It’s also a look at the entitled, clueless toffs who descend on places like Nantucket as if no one lives there when summer ends. It will give you an appreciation for those who exercise stoic self-restraint among those who think nothing of $100 tips for bellhops. The flip side is that they also think nothing of blaming them for their own errors or demanding dismissal for perceived slights.

 

This being a summer read, you can expect a (relatively) chirpy ending. You might even be tempted to pay Nantucket a visit. Maybe in offseason. At a reasonably priced hotel.

 

Rob Weir

Art Road Trip: What’s Good at the Hood?

 

Hood Art Museum

Hanover, New Hampshire

May 2023

[Click on photos for large view]

 

 

 

We made a return trip to the Hook Art Museum because it has an exhibit of Margaret Bourke-White photos. Bourke-White (1904-71) is an iconic name in photography and deservedly so. She was sometimes critiqued for posing her subjects–allegedly a no-no during the 1930s-40s among those who insisted that all documentary work should capture images exactly as the lens saw them. Courtesy of Susan Sontag and others, we now assume that the camera “lies” no matter whether an image is spontaneous or posed. After all, the moment shutterbugs point the camera left instead of right, they have “edited.” 

 

 

Bourke-White was a proto third-wave feminist in that she led an army of other women photographers who kicked out the jams of what was expected of female artists. She even had the first cover of Life Magazine, which is also the source of the Hood exhibit of shots she took during World War II. Alas, there are two problems with the exhibit. First, it’s quite small and we could have used a lot more images to showcase her considerable talents. A much bigger issue, though, is one that’s endemic in museums: inappropriate lighting. Displaying photographs, especially those in black and white, requires close attention to the type of illumination used and the placement of images. The Bourke-Whites were hung in a straight line along a corridor that’s dark at one end and flooded with light from a window at the other. The most enduring impression is that the bounce of harsh lights upon the glass rendered many of Bourke-White’s prints hard to appreciate. She was known for her eye for composition and that’s still evident. What’s not so easy to see is her command of tonal range. I was only able to snap three okay(ish) images and even they have a brown cast that’s not in the original. Oh well. You can always use Google Images to see what these shots don’t convey.

 

 

 

What’s good about the Hood is that it’s a true teaching museum, so there’s always something interesting to see. We concentrated on Latino and Indigenous political art, which took up most of the top floor. It pretty much details grievances and identity issues from the political awakening of the 1970s to the present with visits to the past. Many of you have probably seen well-traveled works such as Yolanda Lopez’s Who’s the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? or Jesus Barraza’s Indian Land.

 

 

The 1970s were a period in which the United Farm Workers Union led by Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez was at its height. In 1973, the UFW launched a strike against Gallo wines and a boycott of table grapes. The Hood displays a poster of the strike from an unknown artist and an Incan-meets-psychedelia boycott image from Xavier Viramontes. Raisins, of course, are sun-ripened grapes. They too came in for scrutiny as we see in Ester Hernandez’s advertising caricature Sun Raid. 

 

 

 

 

Menchaca

 

The 1980s saw a backlash against the farmworkers, but as Michael Menchaca’s work from 1985 shows, political consciousness remained high. It has remained so. Note Rupert Garcia’s Obama From Douglass that shows an unbroken link from Frederick Douglass to America’s first black president. A wall of posters of activists  from Joe Hill to the present shows the major strength of left movements: a long historical memory.  

 

 

 

 

Latinos have their own “Say their names” memory aids and have taken small steps toward LGBTQ concerns. Keith Monkman’s study for Lit Skin in a Limo is at once whimsical and defiant. 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m not sure how much longer any of this will be on display. You might not like some of the more contemporary pieces, but I can say with confidence that a trip to the Hood will make you think. If you’re lucky, some of the museum’s superb collection of Australian aboriginal art will be on display.

 

Rob Weir

The Buried Giant: Discover this Ishiguro Fantasy

 

THE BURIED GIANT (2016)

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Penguin Random House, 317 pages.

★★★★

 

 

I adore Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro, in part because the man seldom repeats himself. The Buried Giant is a new spin on Arthurian legends. Several fellow authors complained that Ishiguro was disrespectful of the fantasy genre, as if there’s such a thing as a fantasy standard.

 

Ishiguro takes us to late 6^th century Britain. I emphasize the last word because by the 6^th century, much of modern-day Britain was under the control of Anglo and Saxon tribes that filled the vacuum as Roman Empire control collapsed. Without getting into too much detail, “England” is a vulgarization of “Angle-Land,” a nod for one of the dominant Germanic tribes that migrated across the Channel during the 4^th-6^th centuries. The “Britons” were Celtic peoples who battled both Roman and Germanic invaders. If you want to identify the true “British” peoples, they are Scots, Welsh, and various tribes that inhabited the Cornish peninsula. King Arthur, if he existed at all, was likely a 6^th century Welsh Briton who temporarily stymied Saxon advances into the region.  

 

Ishiguro riffs off the post-Arthurian period, mixes in a Greek legend, and fashions a fable of identity, memory, and the fragility of peace. Buried memory is the “giant” of the book’s title. Though Ishiguro has never said so directly, he was probably also inspired by a mysterious landmark of a giant figure carved into a chalky Dorset hillside near Cerne Abbas.  

 

Cerne Abbas

 

The central protagonists are an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice–her name a possible Dante homage–who live in a village of joined homes and passages that evoke a thatched-roof version of ancient Skara Brae. They have long been devoted to each other, insofar as they can recall. That’s a problem; a strange mist hangs over the land and no one has clear long-term memory. They have just suffered the indignity of having their candle taken away by the villagers, ostensibly because locals fear Axl and Beatrice are too elderly to be trusted with a candle. They decide to visit their son, who left many years ago. Beatrice only thinks she knows the way to his village and neither of them can recall his face. Call it a strange pilgrimage.

 

Along their route they are warned to avoid the ferryman, whose unanswered questions have dire consequences. If you conjure images from the Greek myth of Charon who ferries souls down the River Styx, you’re on the right track. Axl and Beatrice encounter other figures whose roles and loyalties are uncertain. One is Sir Gawain, the last knight of Arthur’s Roundtable, now aged and more like a rusty-armored Don Quixote than the courteous and gallant Grail-seeker of medieval romance. They also encounter Wistan, a Saxon warrior raised among Britons, and Edwin, an orphan Saxon boy whom Wistan identifies as a future warrior–if Edwin can avoid being killed by zealots. The Buried Giant is also an allegory of the struggle between Briton Christianity and Saxon paganism, though both peoples inhabit a world inhabited by faeries and ogres. Edwin has a wound interpreted as an ogre bite, which both Christians and pagans associated with black magic.  

 

Quite a lot happens on the various journeys of each character, including a very strange stayover at a monastery. Axl has no idea about his own past, but he and Beatrice suspect that the mist that robs people of their memory is the breath of a she-dragon named Querig. Perhaps if Gawain or Wistan can kill the Merlin-enchanted beast, memory can be restored. But what if the same mist also obscures old hatreds between Britons and Saxons and has kept the peace? Is it desirable to slay the aging dragon or let her live out her fading life? Ishiguro writes via Wistan, “The giant, once well buried, now stirs. When he rises … the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers.” Allegorically, the candle is memory, the mist is collective forgetfulness, and the giant is a painful past.

 

Ishiguro’s enigmatic ending has been criticized with some validity. He also took hits for taking liberties with legends, though that’s another strange critique as doing so is pretty much par for Arthurian tales. I found it a fascinating novel chockful with provocative dilemmas. A Guardian writer called it “Game of Thrones with a conscience.” Indeed!

 

Rob Weir