Tobsha Learner: Soul

When a geneticist researching a possible genetic basis for violence kills a man in self defence without compunction she begins to believe that not only a tendency to violence, but also to remorselessness, may be hereditary and that she has inherited those traits from her great grandmother, a woman who was accused of murdering her husband.
In the wake of her action her life starts to spiral out of control. Her husband runs off with her best friend. She suffers from a traumatic miscarriage resulting in infertility. Her colleagues are not supportive of the military funding her research, a subject about which she is severely conflicted, particularly when she discovers the army is keeping information from her. She then discovers that her husband’s lover is pregnant. At each point violence becomes a more and more attractive option until she finds herself planning her ex-husband’s murder.
Interlaced throughout this story is the tale of her great grandmother’s life, from her engagement through to her trial for her husband’s murder.
The book culminates in a revelation about the importance of nurture’s impact on nature. And as vague as this summary is, I can’t really go into any more detail without giving too much away.
I was initially attracted to this story because of the main character’s ethical dilemma about the potential uses of her research and while this is an integral part of her character it isn’t the focus of the entire story and the book is none the worse for that.
This author is known for her erotica collections and there was a touch of erotica in this book but it is a distinctly minor element, thank goodness because her erotic writing style doesn’t appeal to me and is the reason I put off reading this for as long as I have.
I needn’t have worried. I really enjoyed watching the two interwoven stories unfold. The actions of each woman seemed not only completely believable but entirely reasonable from their point of view. Identifying with them as heroines makes the reader think about their own potential for violence in similar circumstances-where exactly would you draw the line.
The plot skips along at times and while that thinness is filled out by great characterization it is a fault that prevents this story from taking the step from very good to great.
It leans heavily towards the literary end of the scale but is highly enjoyable and I will be seeking out more of Ms Learner’s work.-Lynn

The Unsung Hero - Suzanne Brockman

Navy SEAL Tom Paoletti knew it was going to hurt when the Seahawk he, his team and the object of their rescue mission had fled blew. He hadn't realised that the resulting concussion, combined with an ill-advised heated argument Rear Admiral Tucker, would result in a forced recuperation period away from his hand-picked team.
But maybe going home for a few days wouldn't hurt - except that, collecting his luggage at Logan, Tom saw a man who really, really reminded him of a terrorist he tracked for four months in '96. The Merchant was supposed to be dead, and Massachusetts is hardly a terrorist hotbed, but Tom couldn't shake the feeling that, with a couple of cosmetic surgery alterations, it was his man. Tom reported the sighting, then tried to put it out of his mind, focusing instead on the small town where he grew up. Seeing his niece, Mallory, would be worth the trip and forced time off, and catching up with his great-uncle Joe was always a pleasure.
Plus there was the possibility of seeing Kelly, the girl next door now all grown up, daughter of Joe's best friend Charles. And then he saw the Merchant again, this time in his tiny hometown of Baldwin's Bridge. Is this a product of a serious concussion, or is there really an international terrorist plotting, undetected, on the US East coast?
Well, of course it's the latter, but the uncertainty is beautifully written and comprises only one strand of a meticulously, seamlessly woven tapestry that involves plots about Joe and Charles' World War 2 history, two current romances, one long lost love, personal growth and coming of age, substance over style, the pettiness of small town bigotry and the triumph of rationality and intellect, and a celebration of fantasy/science fiction and graphic art. That's on top of convincing dialogue, realistic characters, strong women, and some really lovely sex scenes (including a hot, public places/near discovery moment).
The Unsung Hero is an homage to the men and women who fought in the Second World War and, unusually for an American novel, this includes the French and the Brits. Joe and Charles' history is woven through the contemporary text, as painful and immediate as the unfolding events Tom's experiencing.
The Unsung Hero is the first in a fifteen book (so far) series about a connected group of Navy SEALS looking for love. I find the books, which I've just discovered I haven't reviewed, particularly satisfying because of the overlapping, intertwining arcs - in each novel there are visits from past central protagonists, the beginnings of new relationships, and a harmonious, supportive, joyous relationship. The ending is neither unconvincingly tied up nor cliff hanger-y, and one of the many joys of this series is the knowledge that previous characters and relationships will appear in support of the larger cast and evolving big picture. I've thus far found this series without exception to be layered, nuanced, beautifully crafted, meticulously plotted, enjoyable and deeply satisfying. - Alex

The Troubleshooters series:
The Unsung Hero; Defiant Hero; Over the Edge; Out of Control; Into the Night; Gone too Far; Flashpoint; Hot Target; Breaking Point; Into the Storm; Force of Nature; All Through the Night; Into the Fire; Dark of Night; Hot Pursuit;Breaking the Rules

War Reporting for Cowards - Chris Ayers

Subtitled Between Iraq and a Hard Place, this tells the story of LondonTimes financial-turned-entertainment reporter Ayres' embedment with the US Army's 2nd Battalion 11th Marines artillery squadron.

I really like Ayres' voice, from his contemplation of Marine codes for contact with the enemy:

'Contact', in the language of the Marines, where all emotion is surgically removed to avoid collateral damage to troop morale, means being attacked by the enemy. When fire is returned it becomes 'engagement'. A nuclear exchange, presumably, is a white wedding.

Ayres was not a born war correspondent, and he's admirably honest about his complete disinclination to cover the war in Iraq. In fact, I was struck more by his candour than anything else in this well-written and absorbing book. This is nowhere more striking than in his account of September 11 - an Englishman in New York, Ayres sets the scene with his arrival in America some months earlier, and is open about his utter failure to grasp the impact of the event initially - unhappily caffeine free, and hypochondriacally worrying about his gall bladder after reading the New York Times lead story on arsenic poisoning,

I stepped into the lift at precisely 8:50 a.m.

"Down?" I asked.

"Did you hear anything about the trade center?" came the unexpected reply...

At first the words 'trade center' didn't mean anything to me. It was early, after all, and I hadn't had my morning espresso...

I wondered if this was a news story. If so, I was ill-equipped to cover it: I kept all my pens and spiral-bound notebooks at work...

There were probably much bigger stories to be worrying about, I thought. What with the arsenic in the water supply, this would probably make only a few hundred words: a photo story, perhaps.

The account that follows is vivid and traumatised, and brought back the full horror I felt watching events unfold in the middle of the night in Melbourne. In New York but not of it, Ayres speaks with shock, removed from the situation by shock and otherness - when he notices the proliferation of American flags he realises that he's "in a foreign country at war. The US had never really felt foreign to me: it did now."

His reporting of the first days on the invasion of Iraq is as vivid, honest and raw, which is not to say that it's in any way unpolished or unsophisticated. I found War Reporting for Cowards by chance while looking for follow-up works after reading The Faith Club. I'm glad I did, though I don't recommend reading it in public if you're liable to get chocked up revisiting the events of September 11. - Alex

The Real Bravo Two Zero – Michael Asher

In January 1991 an SAS helicopter dropped an elite eight-man team into the Iraq desert. Laden with somewhere between eighty and a hundred kilos of pack each, unprepared for the frigid temperatures of the desert in winter, and with faulty communication equipment, the mission was an abject failure. Discovered by the enemy on the second day and split up in the ensuing confusion, three men died, four were taken captive, and one escaped into the relative safety of Syria. Two of the survivors, escapee ‘Chris Ryan’ and captive ‘Andy McNab,’ wrote memoirs of the mission and have since parlayed their fame into non-fiction and military adventure fiction writing careers. They lay blame, along with a third member of the Bravo Two Zero force, on a number of bodies, including intelligence and the SAS hierarchy. But blame is also laid, particularly by Ryan, on one of the dead platoon members, Sergeant Vince Phillips.
When former SAS member turned author Asher read the accounts, something didn’t quite ring true. The versions differed in significant detail, and some of the aspects, particularly about the local people, didn’t cohere with Asher’s experiences as a volunteer teacher in the Sudan or his consequent time living with a Bedouin tribe. So, with the blessing of Sergeant Phillips’s family, and with a BBC film-crew in tow, he set off to retrace the team’s journey, almost ten years later.
I knew very little about the initial mission and sequela, though I’d heard of both McNab and Ryan as writers of military fiction (the former particularly for a YA audience) and had some vague awareness of military backgrounds, the SAS and heroism. The rapid immersion into the events was a little overwhelming but generally compelling, and I felt Asher was even-handed though with sympathies inclined toward Phillips from the outset – justifiably, as it turns out. He explores the possibility that his findings, from interviews with key Iraqi figures to the geography, may be untrue, falsified or manipulated by the Iraqi government (his research was conducted pre-September 11), and he given strong reasons in support of believing these versions over the textual ones.
That the men displayed feats of heroism and amazing endurance is never questioned, but many of the significant details are strongly called into question. As Asher concludes,

Their true heroism is only marred… by the dubious nature of much of what they have subsequently written. So why was the basic story not enough?
The blame must lie not with McNab and Ryan, but with us, the reading public, who demand of our heroes not only endurance, but the esolution of all problems by force.

I was interested in how strongly shaped the mission was by lack of understanding of what they were headed for, and of the essential nature of the majority of people they would encounter – Bedouin rather than Iraqi. As a social scientist I was fascinated by the idea of conducting this kind of operation without any sociological briefing, or with even one member of the party being able to speak any of the languages of the region. The SAS members’ attitude was heavily influenced by the kind of propaganda common in war, of the enemy as inhumane and brutish, and this is mirrored in the authors’ accounts of events. Asher compares the captured men’s treatment with that meted out by the Gestapo and by the Korean army during those wars, ending this section with:

it has to be said, in all fairness, and without excusing them in any sense for their brutality, that in retrospect the SAS might have done far worse than to fall into Iraqi hands. If it had been the Provisional IRA into whose clutches they had fallen, it is most unlikely they would have survived.

The comparisons between McNab and Ryan’s texts reminded me at times of theological comparisons of the Gospels, particularly John Shelby Spong's marvellous but somewhat inaccessible work surrounding the Crucifixion and Resurrection, which was unexpected. This is not intended to any way minimise the courage of the soldiers nor the strength, courage and endurance they demonstrated, but I found The Real Brave Two Zero all in all an interesting and well-written investigative piece into an event that has been mythologised in British military lore, and am interested in reading the two original versions of events.- Alex

The 'Caine' Mutiny - Herman Wouk

Willis "Willie" Keith has been fairly protected, sheltered from the harsher realities of life by his doting yet domineering mother. Fearful of being drafted into the Army, Willie signs up as a midshipman, hoping to miss the War altogether. After an eventful beginning Willie is assgned to the USS Caine, a WWI destroyer turned minesweeper.
Willie has never seen Navy life as being real, and he fails to take his assignments seriously, starting with his response when he misses his rendezvous with the Caine. When he finally catch up with her Willlie discovers that the Caine is barely held together, both physically and disciplinarily, a situation he attributes to the captain. Between his contempt for the Navy in general, and De Vriess in particular, Willie falls foul of him and, unable to acknowledge that the incident was his own doing, sulks and blames his superior.
When De Vriess is relieved Willie is ecstatic - the new captain is determined, military and thorough. It doesn't take long, though, for Willie to discover that Queeg is manipulative, bullying and petty, and he quickly loses the respect of his crew. Hidebound by the rules, and apparently terrified of doing wrong, or at least of being seen to do wrong, Queeg is inept, distracted from the big picture by little trivialties, furious if crossed, and a coward.
This last is the deciding factor in turning Queeg's officers against him, and when Queeg conducts an inquiry into the disappearance of a quart of strawberries, reliving a triumph of his early years, the disquiet turns to mutiny. Keefer, an intellectual passing time as Communications Officer while writing a novel, sows the seeds, suggesting that Queeg is mentally ill and implying that he ought to be relieved as unfit for duty. Maryk, second in command, begins secretly keeping a log book of all Queeg's strange behaviour and, in the midst of a severe typhoon, with Queeg apparently unable to make an independant decision, Maryk relieves his captain, supported by the officers on deck.
Though it only occupies the tail end of the book, Maryks' court martial and its aftermath constitute the meat of The 'Caine' Mutiny. While the lead up to that point, including what led Willie to the ship, is obviously necessary for the mutiny to have any power, I felt the long and somewhat rambling first half dated the novel, though this wasn't something I noticed when I first read it, over a decade ago. I just kept thinking how much better a tighter version of the text would be, with less focus on Willie and his pre-'Caine' life - his domineering mother, doomed (or is it?) love affair with the night club singing daughter of Italian immigrants, casual disregard of the Navy as real, and piano-playing gifts, all unquestionably contribute to his role in the lead up to the mutiny and to the mutiny itself, but the parts of the books that sang for me were those that dealt with the increasingly eccentric Queeg, and the court martial scenes. In comparison with their vibrancy, the rest of the novel felt like it was just marking time.
I'm glad I reread what I recalled being an interesting and captivating novel of psychological drama, but I don't think I'll need to read it again. - Alex