Whether it’s the natural world, imagined worlds of an alternate reality, or the world of deadly Renaissance art; there’s much to enjoy with these three novels.
"The Impossible Thing" by Belinda Bauer
Author of "Blacklands," "Rubbernecker," and "Snap," Belinda Bauer has put together an enviable list of novels that have been noticed by Award-giving bodies, especially those related to Crime Fiction. Her latest is a curious blend of the natural sciences, with the world of collectors - who exhibit greed and ambition. And interestingly enough, it plays with two distinct narrative strands - one set around 1926, and one set close to a century later. Connecting the two-time junctures is the world of egg collecting and the diverse sets of people who inhabit this world. It’s the red guillemot egg that lies at the center of the story. So this is egg collecting of a rarefied level, the kind of eggs that end up in museums, and before it was outlawed in the mid-1950s, sustained a broad and diverse network of people - from the gangs collecting the eggs to the middlemen and traders, on to the millionaire collectors, and the academic scientists (oologists).
One narrative strand starts in 1926 when waif Celie Shepherd hangs over the cliff at Metland, Yorkshire, to retrieve the first red egg, and we meet middleman George Ambler. In the early 2020s, Weird Nick and his mother are tied up and robbed of a carved case that contained a single scarlet egg. Nick’s mate is Patrick Fort, who we first met in Rubbernecker, then a medical student who suffers from Asperger’s. Flitting between the two narrative strands, we’re treated to stories that have to do with obsessive behavior and desperation. The modern strand is set in Wales, and there’s something very Trainspotting about Nick and Patrick’s misadventures, as they scheme to get the carved case that belongs to Nick back. This is definitely not your run-of-the-mill crime fiction tale, as it’s really more about people, their psychologies, and how they react to situations of stress, and serving their ambition.
"Death of the Author" by Nnedi Okorafor
Drawing on her real-life roots of being an African-American from Nigeria, Okorafor finds ways to turn this into a meta-fictional piece of a very high order. When we meet Zelu at her sister’s wedding, the wheel-bound Literature Major is informed she’s been relieved from her university teaching job and is then told by her literary agent that the novel she submitted has been rejected by the publishing houses it was submitted. In deep frustration, she decides to write something that no one from her judgmental and over-achieving family would expect her to come up with. It’s a SciFi novel that’s set in a post-humanity world that’s populated by androids and AI. The androids have synthetic bodies and are known as Humes - after humans. The AI is in the cloud and called NoBodies. And there’s an entity that calls itself Udide and builds a new world populated by the Creesh - the creatures.
This diverse robot world incites a furious bidding war among the publishers, and Zelu suddenly finds herself a best-selling SciFi author. Structure-wise the book is chapters of Zelu’s life and intermittent chapters of her Rusted Robots bestseller. As Zelu’s life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality blur, with a cutting-edge scientist who works on exoskeletons reaching out to offer her his services via a prototype. Against her family’s wishes, Zelu agrees to be a guinea pig for the device, and it creates a backlash among her readers who think she represents those proudly accepting physical handicaps. There’s a lot that happens with Zelu’s family, and passages devoted to cultural identity for Nigerian Americans and the conflicts that arise when they visit the home country. An element of meta-drama permeates the novel as we wonder how much of this happened to Okorafor. And as for the novel within the novel...
"Perspectives" by Laurent Binet
Historical fiction is the mastered territory of French author Laurent Binet. And in this one, he sets his eyes and mind on Renaissance Italy; specifically the Cosimo Medici-ruled Florence of the mid-16th century. Italy was then a fragmented country of Kingdoms and Duchys - with Italian unification still in the very distant future. So Cosimo Medici ruled as the Duke of Florence in 1557, with a Spaniard wife, and a daughter named Maria, of marrying age. The novel opens with a murder, that of the painter Pontormo, stabbed through the heart in the church where he was working on frescoes for the Duke. When his studio is searched, what becomes a cause of even bigger alarm and scandal for the royal family, is that a Venus and Cupid painting with a very suggestive naked Venus is found, and the face of the Venus is none other than Maria’s.
An epistolary; after the introduction, the rest of the novel consists of letters sent by a diverse range of characters - and what characters they are! Pompous art historian Giorgio Vasari leads the investigation, appointed by Cosimo Medici to get to the bottom of the murder, and why Maria’s image has been used in the Venus painting. Maria herself writes to her aunt, Catherine de’ Medici, Queen of France, unaware that Catherine has designs on reclaiming Florence for the French. Then there are letters between Vasari and his friend in Rome, the Michelangelo that we all know of for his work in the Sistine Chapel. Funny, riotous, and inventive; the novel does a great job of depicting Renaissance Florence, with all the court machinations, and the intrigues that surround this highly competitive milieu of Art and the patrons of these artists. Mixing history with conjecture, and the rich creation of characters, make for enjoyable reading hours.