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Maritime mystery rife with nostalgia

In his quaint debut novel Closer by Sea, author Perry Chafe spins a literary mystery involving coming-of-age, childhood friendships, death and adventure on a small island off the coast of Newfoundland. Although billed as a thriller and containing a few modest scares, Closer poses no threat to anyone with blood pressure or insomnia issues.

Originally hailing from a small fishing community in Newfoundland, Chafe is a television writer, showrunner and producer who has worked on the CBC TV series Republic of Doyle and Son of a Critch, among other productions. Chase’s TV background influences his writing style: Closer by Sea often reads like The Goonies reimagined as a CBC made-for-TV movie that has been parlayed into a novel.

The novel is set in the 1990s, as the Perigo Island fishery is on the cusp of collapse. It follows that the novel is the most engaging in passages depicting 12-year-old Pierce Jacob’s cherished island life: the wonder of the nearby glaciers, the minutiae of the fishing industry and the freedom of kids set loose on ATVs from morning to night during summer (without cellphones). Closer by Sea is in rockier waters when dealing with the central mystery of a teenager, Anna Tessier, who has gone missing.

When Pierce is eight, his fisherman father goes missing at sea. Devastated, Pierce meets Anna during a failed solo attempt to go looking for his dad. Pierce and Anna develop a kindred-spirit-level bond, despite only crossing paths a few times. The whole island joins in the search and when Anna doesn’t turn up, the adults speculate she has run away to the mainland (again). Pierce ardently believes Anna couldn’t have run away; she had promised him that she wouldn’t. He convinces his pals, Thomas and Bennie, that they must find out what’s happened to Anna themselves since the adults don’t take them seriously.

Susan Musgrave on what happens after the worst

After spending years on high alert, anticipating the worst and attempting to prevent it, Susan Musgrave is learning to live with its aftermath.

The Griffin-nominated poet's husband, Stephen Reid, and younger daughter, Sophie Musgrave Reid, died within just a few years of each other, the former claimed by a lung infection and heart failure at age 68, the latter by an overdose at 32.

Suddenly they were gone, and with that nightmare realized, they left a yawning hole where her dread once lived.

"Stephen and Sophie living with addiction, you become hypervigilant. You try and keep control of lives that are out of control, so you're always watching for everything," Musgrave said by phone from her home on Haida Gwaii.

Winslow’s gangsters back for more mayhem in scorching sequel

Danny Ryan never wanted to be a godfather — decent blue-collar guy, loving husband and father, loyal to his friends… such a lovely man, except when he’s killing people.

Kind of like Michael Corleone, without the couth.

When our tale begins — or more accurately, resumes, this being the second book of American author Don Winslow’s latest trilogy — some exceptionally bad people are making Danny watch as they prepare to burn some other people alive, after which it will be Danny’s turn.

It’ll be almost 350 pages before we find out what (shudder) happens, but don’t forget that Winslow has promised us it’s a trilogy, and he’s made a big career writing about people who know what’ll happen to them if they lie to their customers.

Narrator’s quest for purpose, identity at core of deft debut

Some new writing is so refreshing and articulate, the reader will follow the author anywhere. Toronto’s Marta Balcewicz offers a first novel that fits that description; it is unusual but completely plausible and real.

Big Shadow is narrated by the main character, 17-year-old Judy, who has just finished high school and, as the novel begins, is trying to take seriously the work she has been assigned by her cousin Christopher and his pal Alex, both also 17. They are studying the clouds, trying to interpret what the clouds’ shapes mean, especially to the people watching them. But sooner or later, they will have to decide what they are going to do in the fall — attend university?

Balcewicz restricts the novel to a minimum of people living in or near a small city in 1998. Judy’s life seems simple, uncluttered by commitments. She had a boyfriend for a really short time and he has left town. She lives with her mother, who works at a library and has little social life — “she’d degenerated unnaturally quickly.”

One rainy summer day, Judy is on the protected steps of a university building when a man hurriedly joins her to get out of a sudden downpour. He speaks to her, and she encourages him. He’s tall and middle-aged. After a brief exchange, he seems to think she is bright. She tells him, “‘I’m going to start classes here in the fall.’”

Trio of Belgian women thrill in wartime fiction

American author Pam Jenoff has a reputation for writing books with unexpected plot twists. Her latest and ninth book, Code Name Sapphire, is no exception. At the end, many will be left saying “I didn’t see that coming.” Jenoff has taken many events and characters from real life during the Second World War, shuffled the deck and rearranged events and characters to create a compelling story centred around the interactions of three women in occupied Belgium and the tough choices they each face.

Hannah is a political cartoonist with the Resistance in Berlin in 1942. She narrowly escapes a Gestapo raid that ends with the death of her fiancé Isaac. Eventually, she makes her way to Hamburg, where she hides for several months before booking passage on a ship carrying refugees to Cuba.

After the ship is turned away, they try for America but “the price for saving a ship full of Jews was too much for even the president of the United States to bear.” (Sound familiar?) Hannah stays with the ship as it returns to Belgium. Occupied by the Nazis, the country is hardly safer than Germany, but Hannah hopes her cousin Lily, who lives in Brussels, will take her in.

Lily had left the family home in Antwerp and moved to Brussels nine years earlier to marry Nik, more than a decade her senior, the doctor who has treated her dying mother. Lily, whose family was in the diamond trade in Antwerp, is a proper society lady in Brussels, naive about the Nazi occupation since being Jewish in predominantly Catholic but tolerant Belgium had never been an issue. Now it was a liability, and one that made their futures uncertain.

Economic whistleblower zeroes in on China

This is the third edition of confessions written by American economist John Perkins, which began in 2004 with the publication of Confessions of an Economic Hitman and was revised in 2016 as The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. It’s now clear to about two million readers in dozens of languages that when it comes to demystifying money and politics, nobody does it better. What Albert Einstein is to physics, what Lennon and McCartney are to music and what Steven Spielberg is to movies, John Perkins is to the mysteries of economics, the master of exposing the dark side of development.

Perkins was a wholesome New England kid who was raised and educated to believe that as an American, his first duty was to be “the Good Guy.” He believed that; he was a star in the Peace Corps in the late 1960s, then landed a plum job as a “strategic consultant” for a leading engineering development firm.

There he was shocked to learn that his real job was to colonize developing countries whose resources — oil, minerals, perhaps — were needed by American corporations. He was trained to visit and convince these countries to accept huge development loans they probably could not repay, and ultimately demand cheap access to their actual resources and political support instead of payment. In the meantime, jobs and profits from these projects went to Americans, and poverty levels remained the same in countries targeted for “development.”

Perkins was not alone — there were many such men and women in the 1970s known privately in the trade as EHM, or economic hit men. Behind them were another level of persuaders known as “the jackals,” hired assets mandated to use bribery, blackmail or even assassination to inspire co-operation and get results. Perkins failed to persuade at least two South American leaders — Omar Torrijos of Panama and Jaime Roldós Aguilera of Ecuador — to play the debt game, both of whom died in private plane crashes within weeks of each other.

On the Night Table

TJ Klune

Author, In the Lives of Puppets

Horror is my great love — I love horror novels, love the genre. I’ve been reading it since I was a kid. So I’m always interested in finding new horror authors that are coming out to put their spin on the story. I just finished reading a book called The Spite House by Johnny Compton. It’s his debut novel and it’s a short read, but it is fantastic. It is a great haunted house novel about a Black family that moves into a white neighbourhood... and it is extraordinary. It is so, so good. I enjoyed every second of it.

New in paper

Either/Or: A Novel

By Elif Batuman (Penguin, $25)

Picking up where Batuman’s The Idiot left off, protagonist Selin sets out on an international journey while trying to navigate life at an Ivy League school.

Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters

Canada’s role in U.S. Civil War, Lincoln’s death examined in engaging account

Democracy is not worrying the walls are thin.

Which is just as well, since what Julian Sher is letting us know is as hair-raising as discovering the Mona Lisa was paint-by-numbers.

Sher’s words — well said and documented — do us a refreshing favour by explaining that Canada didn’t just support the Underground Railroad that funnelled southern slaves into this country.

We also gave birth to something highly controversial and less noble in the American Civil War — an underground highway of mayhem and mischief operated in Canada by Confederate spies and agents for export to their enemy, the North.

Texas parents fret over Winnie the Pooh being used to teach kids about school shootings

DALLAS (AP) — Cindy Campos' 5-year-old son was so excited about the Winnie the Pooh book he got at school that he asked her to read it with him as soon as he got home. But her heart sank when she realized it was a tutorial about what to do when “danger is near,” advising kids to lock the doors, turn off the lights and quietly hide.

As they read the “Stay Safe” book the school sent home without explanation or a warning to parents, she began crying, leaving her son confused.

“It’s hard because you’re reading them a bedtime story and basically now you have to explain in this cute way what the book is about, when it’s not exactly cute,” Campos said.

She said her first-grader, who goes to the same elementary school as her pre-K son, also got a copy of the book last week. After posting about it in an online neighborhood group, she found other concerned parents whose kids had also brought the book home.

Modern-day addiction to ultra-processed food poses range of health risks

If, as the old saying goes, we are what we eat, then we’re some combination of emulsifiers, gums, modified starch, high-fructose corn syrup, palm oil, invert sugars, hydrolysed protein isolates and various other additives and flavourings, just to name a few.

And that ultra-processed food (UPF), writes British infectious diseases doctor, university professor and broadcaster Chris van Tulleken, is not good for individual health or for society in general.

Most studies on UPF consumption focus on obesity, he states, but there is evidence that increased intake is strongly associated with increased risk of other health concerns such as cardiovascular disease, cancers, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, fatty liver disease and irritable bowel syndrome.

“Almost every food that comes with a health claim on the packet is a UPF,” he writes in Ultra-Processed People.

Bovey’s survey of Western Canadian art a clear and passionate account

Surveys of Canadian art have tended to focus on central Canada, with the western provinces often getting only a cursory look. In this comprehensive new book, Patricia Bovey, an art historian, academic, gallery director and just-retired Manitoba senator, addresses this marginalization, not just by focusing on visual art in the West, but also by challenging the conventional structures and approaches that have historically divided art into the centre and the margins.

In their place, Bovey offers a complex flow of intertwining narratives that trace the development of visual art in the four western provinces. She begins with a brief chronological overview, mentioning pre-contact foundations, going on to early “itinerant” immigrant artists and exploring the gradual 20th-century expansion of professional art scenes in the main western cities.

Bovey is not hung up on timelines, however, which can be overly determined and which often slot art into narrow categories and discard what doesn’t quite fit.

She uses other approaches to organize her material, starting with a section that concentrates on medium and technique, grounding her discussion in the materiality of art and the development of visual languages. She cites such examples as Ann Kipling’s delicate drawings, Reta Cowley’s luminous watercolours, prints by artists working through Winnipeg’s Grand Western Canadian Screen Shop and the innovative sculptures of Brian Jungen, created with ordinary consumer goods.

Abstract beauty in fragmentary fiction

This is not an easy book to read.

Barely 40 but already celebrated, British poet/novelist Max Porter here, as is his wont, drops a gauntlet, daring his readers to pick it up. The challenge issued is thorny. Be careful.

The dare is now technically complex — pages and pages of this tiny, paradoxical “novel” are almost impossible to decipher, with mutating voices, morphing fonts, unorthodox typographic layout and unruly punctuation.

And the dare is now narratively obtuse — it is quite simply very difficult to discern the characters, the setting and the plot of this thing, whatever it is. It is unquestionably beautiful, but that beauty is ephemeral, it is tormenting and it is bewitching. Porter does not so much usher his readers along as wilfully, joyfully thwart them, somehow managing to pull off a wondrous trick: one is consistently lost in these finite pages but irrationally compelled to read on. The book becomes a bad habit that will not go away.

Rethinking value of work key to combatting exhaustion

There exists a taken-for-grantedness with work.

For most of us, we get up on prescribed days of the week and march off to a second home, where we engage in tasks and thinking in exchange for money. Some of us who are lucky enough, including this reviewer, are even excited each morning to work. Some see work as a calling — a place where we find meaning, community and purpose.

But for Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, our obsession with meaning-making through work is not only a recent phenomenon, but also one that could very well be problematic. In On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity, a short collection of long-form essays and part of Atlantic Editions, Thompson makes the case for what he labels “workism:” a new religion based on the idea that people “ask their jobs to provide community, transcendence, meaning, self-actualization, existential therapy — all the things we have historically sought from organized religion.”

Our species is highly creative and capable of great feats. But in the 21st-century North America, this has translated into longer hours worked with many “feeling overextended, exhausted, and empty.” These are the lessons, however, that we have taught ourselves in our society — that hard work and devotion to it are the bedrocks for fulfilment. Crawling to your home on a Friday night at the end of the week when you haven’t spent time with your family, your partners, or neighbours is the norm.

Forensic accountant in over his head in Doctorow’s techno-thriller

For veteran science-fiction author Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, Radicalized), the digital age has provided fertile ground to examine a panoply of ideas ranging from the dangers of creeping government and corporate surveillance to the role of technology in organizing consumers and activists. Doctorow is an author well aware of the worst uses of technology as well as its unlimited potential.

Because of the subject matter, you would expect that Doctorow tends to tell stories about younger people, and this has generally been the case, with some of his most notable work occurring in the category of young adult fiction. Red Team Blues bucks that trend, however, in telling a contemporary techno-thriller tale starring a 67-year-old accountant named Martin Hench. And it’s a page-turner.

It can be easy to forget just how many decades we are into the digital age at this point — long enough, and then some, for someone to have spent a career on the cutting edge of digital finance and reached retirement age at the end of it. To be more specific, Doctorow’s white-haired hero has spent his long career specializing in digital forensic accounting, finding where tax cheats — including sometimes some very dangerous people — hide their money. As you can expect, in the course of this work it was inevitable he would eventually cross the wrong person.

So when Hench takes on a contract with a cryptocurrency billionaire to track down some stolen encryption keys with a value in the high nine figures, it’s no surprise that everyone from crooked tech bros to the Russian mafia have a stake in the outcome. The beleaguered spreadsheet sleuth quickly realizes he may be on his last case. The commission could allow him to retire comfortably, or he might experience a painful death.

Treatise on class struggle mines policy, backstory

On Class is about, just as its title says, class in Canadian society: what it is, who talks about it (or not) and how.

It’s a nifty, provocative little book.

On Class is the seventh short-book title in Canadian publisher Biblioasis’s Field Notes non-fiction series that focuses on economic, public-policy and cultural issues. Biblioasis touts its series titles as the literary descendants of 18th-century political pamphlets.

Deborah Dundas is the Toronto Star’s books editor. Broadly speaking, her book is about debunking the American Dream — and its Canuck cousin — that holds that through smarts and hard work anyone can rise from poverty to, if not wealth, at least middle-class comfort.

Family’s grieving of 9/11 death offers valuable lessons

On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory is not a self-help book. Nor is it a challenge to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s notion of the five stages of grief, at least not directly. It’s the extraordinary account of the grief suffered by the family of Robert George (Bobby) McIlvaine, who died at age 26 in the 9/11 attacks in New York City in 2001.

Jennifer Senior was fortunate to have a connection to the family; her brother (unnamed) was Bobby’s roommate in 2001, and she knew the family. She used this connection to interrogate Bobby’s mother, father, brother and fiancée to write this essay for the Atlantic magazine. Originally titled Twenty Years Gone, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2022.

Even luckier for Senior is the fact that each member of the McIlvaine family mourned in dramatically different ways. This is no surprise. As Senior notes: “Every mourner has a different story to tell.”

And not just the McIlvaines. Mourning is “idiosyncratic, anarchic, polychrome.” The McIlvaines just happen to be particularly vivid examples.

Bergen back for book club seconds

The Free Press Book Club is pleased to welcome back critically acclaimed Winnipeg novelist David Bergen to the next virtual meeting on Monday, May 29 at 7 p.m. to read from and discuss his award-winning novel Out of Mind.

Published by Goose Lane in September 2021, Out of Mind revisits the character of Lucille Black, who first appeared in Bergen’s 2010 Giller-shortlisted novel The Matter With Morris. In his latest, Lucille is at the centre of the story — a psychiatrist, mother and grandmother who ruminates on the death of her son Martin, travels to Thailand to check in on her daughter (who is falling in love with a man who may be a cult leader) and then to France, where she attends a wedding of a man she once thwarted.

In his review of Out of Mind for the Free Press, Neil Besner raved “Bergen has long been recognized for his spare and lean prose. His sculpted sentences are most often constituted via a remarkable alchemy: yearning, bleak stretches of absence, of loneliness and of pain become alloyed with a compassion and tenderness that seem first to emanate from a narrator’s oversight, but finally come to inhabit and inflect his characters as if these feelings were more truly their own… In Lucille, the signature Bergen worldview — always evoked at eye level through characters in charged relation — has centred itself in his most memorable woman, in the most eminently readable of all his fictions to date.”

Out of Mind won Bergen the McNally Robinson Book of the Year award at the 2022 Manitoba Book Awards — his second consecutive win of the prize, having nabbed the award the previous year for his short-story collection Here the Dark.