Saturday's Best Book Diary: Alan Glynn's WINTERLAND: A NOVEL

Dustjacket:  Of course, I say Winterland instead of WinteЯland, the way it appears in the title on the dustjacket of the first American edition.  I especially like the picture on this edition of the novel, the high cranes looming over the garden wall, the garden in the near-ground bearing the implications of mythical Eden.


The dustjacket gives credit for the photo to Maria Buckley (credit for the design goes to David Rutstein and Keith Hayes), and apparently Buckley's Flicker page is at this link.  I've had this novel for some time, marked as a winter read for January due to its title, but the winterland in here is the name of a corporate entity, the name meant to resonate with its cold, calculated materialism and  with the generally dismal atmosphere that corporate globalism has fostered.


The opening line of the prologue is:  "How has it come to this?"  On down the first page the desolate "this" is described as "the eerie and soulless feel of a virtual environment."


The opening line of the first chapter is:  "He is sitting in what they now call the beer garden."


The nice choice of a dustjacket here resonates with the garden part of beer garden.  The beer resonates with human addictions--to alcohol, yes, but also to money, power, drugs, guns, and lots of other things.  Addictions "Я" us.


On the surface level, the book works wonderfully both as a thriller and as an indictment of the way corporate power works to manipulate government and law enforcement.  The pacing is very deliberate, but in this novel, that's a good thing.  It unfolds piece by piece, cause then effect. 

The first chapter:  The first Noel, bystanders did say, was a mean, fat, rotten piece of slime.  Still, he was a child of God in the Cormac McCarthy sense.  We see this Noel bullying an old man by the name of Christy.  A hit man in a ski mask appears suddenly and guns Noel down, then quickly escapes over the beer garden wall.  It turns out that, beyond this one scene, Christy is not a character in the novel at all; so we might wonder, what is his purpose in the novel?


Seems to me, Christy appears as an everyman christ--certainly not as Christ, but only in the everyman small letter sense.  In this novel, to the right eyes, everyman's a christ, everyman's the third Noel.  Existence with the foreknowledge of certain death is the cross we bear.  Though I doubt that many readers will see it that way.


The main protagonist is Gina, related to both murdered Noels, a good modern woman with plenty of true grit and a desire to solve the mysteries in here.  But will she let the cycle of revenge consume her, or will she wise up and step out of the destructive pattern she is in?


That's the question suggested by the prologue, though I prefer the way it is presented in a small paragraph later in the novel:


"It is only now that Gina is beginning to see how she herself is one of these others, how Norton is like a virus she has contracted, or a toxic substance in her system she may never be able to eliminate.  With each step, it becomes a little clearer. . .how he has influenced her behavior, twisted her emotions, choked her sense of who she is. . .how he has turned her into this crazy lady, the mad bitch who can't be stopped."

Norton, mentioned above, is but another child of God, another junky, living in denial but addicted to money and power and wanting to control Death.


By this time, we know that the backwards "R" standing out on the dustjacket must stand for the returning cycle of revenge, and we're hoping that Gina can turn it around before it's too late.


I'm giving this novel five stars at Amazon.  Highly recommended.

Books For January: Susan Froderberg, Alan Glynn, Sven Hassel, Raymond L. Atkins, Barbara Hunt, Nevada Barr, William Kent Krueger, George Sheehan

I read good books all year long, but I'm also something of a seasonal reader.  Gardening books tend to be put off until the spring, hunting books until hunting season, and some Halloween and Christmasy books that I didn't get to last year will be put off until the holidays come around again.


This last year, mystery writer Patricia Abbott (pattinase) started the FRIDAY'S FORGOTTEN BOOK feature on her blog, and a number of other writers joined in the project.  Her summing up of the reviews of these books, with links, is here.  My sole contribution was a review of Ed McBain's Money, Money, Money: A Novel of the 87th Precinct (87th Precinct Mysteries), which The Rap Sheet carried as a part of its THE BOOK YOU HAVE TO READ series. 


Besides Forgotten-Book-Fridays, in this space I intend to celebrate Off-And-Running-Mondays, Transcendental Tuesdays, Western Novel Wednesdays, Literary-Analysis-Thursdays, Freezing-Weather-Fridays, Sports Book Saturdays, and Southern-Gothic-Sundays.  Among others.


Just a few of the books I've tentatively scheduled to post about in January include:


Barbara Hunt's A Little Night Music, not to be confused with the Stephen Sondheim musical of the same name, although there ought to be clowns.


This is a 1947 hardcover that is a little-known gem, way ahead of its time, being obscure to begin with and long out-of-print.  Never mind her other books, which were of hoary scope and witchy horrors.  She wrote like an inspired intellectual angel in this one.  On forgotten-book-friday, I'll post a long synopsis and analysis of the book.  This is one that the NYRB needs to pick up and reprint in a new edition in its series of rediscovered and significant books.


This is the month I'll read Sven Hassel's Legion of the Damned (Cassell Military Paperbacks).  My copy is the 1957 first American edition, the first and most autobiographical in a series of novels which became famous in Europe.  The author, under his real name, was a reluctant conscript in a German penal company, fighting for his life with the Nazis against the Russians in the dead of winter.  This seems like the best month to read such a novel.





Raymond L. Atkins' Sorrow Wood has a wonderful dustjacket, a falling down barn, gothic and surreal, with almost metalic blue floral designs in its title font.  A southern gothic novel with social satire and reincarnation, it says.  We'll see.


William Kent Krueger's Heaven's Keep: A Novel (Cork O'Connor Mysteries) has been on my to-be-read shelf for a long time.  January seems like the right time to read this snowy novel that seems to include thoughtful mystery and heartbreaking longing.





I've saved Alan Glynn's Winterland for January.  It comes highly recommended by Emerald Noir novelists Declan Burke and Adrian McKinty, whose blogs I follow almost daily.  They say it's a paranoia novel that reminds us once again of the corrupting influence of bureaucracy.


Nevada Barr's Winter Study (An Anna Pigeon Novel).  I didn't get to this in my naturalism reading binge in November, but this will fit as well in January.  Last year, I read Nevada Barr's Seeking Enlightenment... Hat by Hat: A Skeptic's Guide to Religion, and she soars in my estimation.  The title may be misleading; it is a very insightful and spiritual book.  A bit like reading Marilynne Robinson.





I've sent for Susan Froderberg's Old Border Road: A Novel, off of this review, link.  She writes with the rhetorical word-magic of Cormac McCarthy, they all say.  Well, I'm willing to be convinced.  I may read it later this week.


I also plan on reading Scott Spencer's newest one, Man in the Woods.  A thriller-of-conscience and a dog story too.





Once a runner, always a runner, but January is the time to start getting in shape again.  I plan to start by being inspired by George Sheehan's  Running & Being: The Total Experience once again.  Other running, fitness, and diet books will no doubt follow, most of them with literary nuances.


The next significant holiday at our house is Valentine's Day, which we celebrate Groundhog Day (Special 15th Anniversary Edition) through Valentine's Day itself.  But that involves next month's reading, so more on that later.