British Racism

In a major historical study, Elkins, an assistant professor of history at Harvard, relates the gruesome, little-known story of the mass internment and murder of thousands of Kenyans at the hands of the British in the last years of imperial rule. Beginning with a trenchant account of British colonial enterprise in Kenya, Elkins charts white supremacy's impact on Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, and the radicalization of a Kikuyu faction sworn by tribal oath to extremism known as Mau Mau. Elkins recounts how in the late 1940s horrific Mau Mau murders of white settlers on their isolated farms led the British government to declare a state of emergency that lasted until 1960, legitimating a decade-long assault on the Kikuyu. First, the British blatantly rigged the trial of and imprisoned the moderate leader Jomo Kenyatta (later Kenya's first postindependence prime minister). Beginning in 1953, they deported or detained 1.4 million Kikuyu, who were systematically "screened," and in many cases tortured, to determine the extent of their Mau Mau sympathies. Much more here.

SHUTTER ISLAND

Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island has something of a dramatic plot twist about two thirds of the way through, if you don't already know. I would be lying if I claimed to not have enjoyed this book. I liked the thrill of that moment when the gimmickery didn't feel like gimmickery, when I was genuinely surprised. That's rare for me, not that I'm smart or anything, just cynical about literary devices and tricky writer shit.

The story itself is about a pair of federal marshals arriving at an institution for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of an inmate, Rachel Solando, who is there for having drowned her children. This prison/mental hospital is on an island. It follows a line of interesting, if not particularly alarming, twists till about 3/4 of the way in we hit up against the stonewall of the big surprise. I won't spoil it for you. There are links to Amazon here. Don't be a hater.

I have two points to make about this book:

1. It strikes me that pretty much anybody (especially if they have a quirky personality) could be committed by their family should the family so desire. Think of any of the people you know over age 25 and let us say that you heard that they had been sent to a mental hospital. Would it be that hard for you to come up with a reason? Something that you could think back to and say, ah, yes, I should have seen it coming? Look at those ugly pictures he has on his blog! What normal person would enjoy such things! I knew he was fucking nuts!

2. The surprise is not the kind where the writer has been thinking of this all along.If you've ever written a short story or a novel and tried to be cute with your endings, you know that surprise endings are fucking hard to pull off. The way it happens most easily, is for the ending to surprise you. You're writing along happily and then it hits you: what if I did this? Or this? I suspect that that is what happened here. You can see the narrative building the suspense in one direction, and then you can see where the lightbulb goes on.

HOT SPRINGS

There is no way to like violent pulp and not like Stephen Hunter's books. These are guys' books if there ever was such a genre. Unlike Tom Clancy, the king of the guys' book, Hunter does not shy away from extremes. His heroes are a little deeper than Clancy's chise-jawed stalwart. The Swaggers et al are very matter-of fact about killing and Hunter is in no way ashamed. Much like Dennis Lehane (whose SHUTTER ISLAND I will look at shortly) he writes his protagonists as tortured with guilt and old sufferings. It is an easy way to get the reader on the side of the man who is going to kill more than a few bad guys before the novel ends.

Hot Springs is neither Hunter's best or worst book, it is simply typical. His hero is Earl Swagger, the father of the hero of a couple of his other books, Bobby Lee Swagger. He is war-hero still haunted by his abusive childhood and his younger brother's suicide. He is requested to join the war against Owney Maddox (based on a real-life gangster who did, in fact, run Hot Springs, Arkansas after WWII, it's a name similar to "Owney Madden"). Needless, to say, the pages of the book start to smell like gunsmoke and sound like the tinkling of spent shell before you're halfway through. Swagger manages to have a fistfight with Bugsy Siegel, drink countless bottles of bourbon, and kill countless hillbillies as well as father Bobby Lee.

This book is not what I would call "quality fiction", it's sort a cross between Dirty Harry and Forrest Gump, now that I think of it. It is raw, violent, male-bravado pulp with no other merit than to keep you turning the pages, but it does its job very well.