social commentary – So Many Books, Choose Wisely

From a Google Image Search – The Bulwark

When Neal Stephenson takes us on a fictionalized historic journey, it will be an improbably wild adventure. However, there will be a contemporary connection. It’s not easy to write social commentary that is both outlandish and entertaining. This is Stephenson’s talent. In Polostan: Volume One of Bomb Light: A Riveting Epic of International Espionage, he combines politics (communism), polo, and physics. How does life unfold for the child of a marriage between a cowgirl and a political activist? Dawn is the child of such a union, and she ends up with two names, two countries, an attachment to tommy guns and Bonny and Clyde, a skill for hitching rides on trains, and for training polo ponies.

In Montana and Wyoming with her mom, she is Dawn Rae Bjornberg. In Chicago with her dad, she is Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva. Out west she trains polo ponies and is privy to the family less-than-legal business concerns. In Chicago she is a socialist activist. When her mom dies of cancer Dawn/Aurora lives full time with her father. Aurora was born in St. Petersburg, renamed Leningrad, and lived there until she was 5. Her parents left from Vladivostok and arrived in Seattle. Her father is dedicated to the Bonus Army, the Bonus Expeditionary Forces of Walter W. Waters (a real person). Her dad is a Red American and a vet. When the Bonus Army gathers in Washington DC (in the 1930s) her father (a Wobbly and a communist) is killed.

Aurora finds herself orphaned and pregnant at 16 after adventures with x rays and a budding physicist who educates her about atomic particles (neutrons had not yet been discovered). She is bilingual with good skills in both American English and Russian. She decides to retrace the steps of her parents and to return to Russia through Seattle. Russia, now the Soviet Union, does not exactly welcome her with open arms.

Comrade Tishenko (described as “a jumped-up peasant) finds her bizarre background difficult to believe. Soviets are paranoid. They see enemies everywhere, “blockages in the Soviet system” from foreign capitalists, cliquism, Jews, inherited rural backwardness, opportunists, hooligans, ineradicable counterrevolutionary tendencies in the Russia Orthodox Church, wreckers, diversionaries, kulaks, Petliurite scum, national deviationists, backsliders, actively malevolent foreign agents, witting and unwitting accomplices. She has to keep explaining why she is fluent in both English and Russian. She is tortured by the OPGU. Read the book for all the gory details.

She meets Fizmatov, who holds a PhD in physics from the University of Paris, helping with the steel factory that is being built at Magnitogorsk. His children are named Electron and Proton. Fizmatov (who made up his name by combining Phys and Math) and Aurora bond over physics. He helps her when he can. Aurora has a tommy gun secreted in the bottom of her trunk. When the Soviets learn of Aurora’s past with training polo ponies in the American West, they find the niche that will allow her to survive for a while. She also is sent out to recruit talent for the steel factory that the Soviets hope to build bigger than the one in Gary, Indiana.

Don’t be fooled by the seeming chaos of Stephenson’s version of history. Anecdotes, even far-out anecdotes, often help his messages go down. Since this novel is only Volume One of Bomb Light, I look forward to where he will take us. He took us on a similar historical journey in his Quicksilver trilogy. It may be the hippy in me that appreciates Neal Stephenson’s strange mashups. He always presents me with a new perspective on current issues and the role of cutting-edge science in modern political power struggles (and their applications to warfare).

Although Cormac McCarthy seemed to dismiss physics as an answer to our current climate dilemmas in his book The Passenger, Stephenson seems to maintain a wait-and-see attitude towards the matter in Polostan. Since America is flirting with authoritarianism, Stephenson may be trying to show how disappointed people were in the 1930s when communism was not living up to its promises.

From a Google Image Search – Houstonian Magazine

The Cellist by Daniel Silva-Book

The Cellist by Daniel Silva begins with a painting, as Gabriel Allon spy stories often do. It begins at Isherwood Galleries with Sarah Bancroft, the beautiful agent Gabriel recruited in The New Girl. Sarah likes to believe Gabriel managed to ruin her for any other life. Right now, Sarah is running the gallery. She decides to sell a somewhat damaged painting called The Lute Player, attributed all these years to the wrong artist. She sees it as a challenge to do this during the COVID-19 pandemic and the gallery could certainly use a spectacular sale. Sarah thinks Viktor Orlov might buy the painting if Gabriel will restore it. Viktor is a Russian oligarch, out of favor with the leader of Russia, hiding in plain sight in England. However, when Sarah gets to Viktor’s house the door is unlocked, but no one answers the bell. She discovers Viktor dead in front of a packet of papers he has just opened. Fortunately, she knows better than to touch anything. The papers are covered with a fine layer of powdered Novichok, a nerve agent.

And there begins a tale of Russia, one of Gabriel’s favorite places to try to fight for human rights and get rid of the bad guys. This is a story of the moment, and I liked it far more than Silva’s other modern story of terrorism, The Black Widow. Perhaps I was simply used to time-mellowed alleys in old world Vienna, scuffles with corrupt Swiss bankers who paid Nazis big bucks for stolen Jewish possessions, his vendetta with the Catholic priests who sided with Nazis, and his special relationship with the Vatican. Something as modern as dealing with ISIS in modern-day France seemed outside Silva’s usual oeuvre.

But Isabel Brenner, the talented cellist who can hold entire symphonies in her memory, is a fine addition to the lovely women Gabriel recruits. He did not recruit her at random. She works for the Russian Laundromat, a secret arm of RhineBank (fictional substitute for DeutscheBank). She is the one who has been passing on RhineBank data sheets to a female Russian journalist Gabriel knows well. Isabel identified herself as Mr. Nobody. Gabriel must decide if Isabel is the one who dusted the documents handed to Viktor with Novichok, or if her spying had been discovered and she was now being used.

We’re talking Russia here–a Russia run by thugs, killers, and thieves. A Russia still governed by a leader trained by the KGB and his cagey bag man Arkady Akimov. Arkady may be so blinded by wealth that he is willing to steal from a man who is more ruthless than he is, but he also loves classical music and indulges in philanthropy with his stolen money. Gabriel comes up with a plot which he hopes will topple RhineBank and Arkady, and perhaps even Arkady’s old neighborhood pal, the president of Russia.

Gabriel’s wife, Chiara, has wrested from him a promise that he will serve only one term as the head of the Israeli secret service after which they, and the twins, will retire to Vienna to be near Chiara’s aging father. Gabriel is using his old team, perhaps in an audition to see who will run ‘the office’ next. The women Gabriel recruits to help in his operations rarely come away unscathed, and neither does Gabriel. Gabriel ends his story in Washington, DC on the worst possible date, January 6^th where he runs into an extremist Qanon believer with a gun. She shoots him through and through. Chiara has one more reason to extort a retirement from a husband who keeps saying that he wants to retire and then getting sucked in one more time. If he lives, will he finally retire. Not if Daniel has a few more books to write which we hope he does. Readers will demand more Gabriel Allon in some form. Although Silva’s commentary on January 6th and Qanon will not please everyone, this reader felt he expressed himself very well on those subjects.

Gabriel serves as an investigator to allow Silva to expose injustices to his readers. Gabriel also exacts the kinds of vengeance we would all like to reap sometimes. The venality people get up to in this world often makes us despair. Do human beings have any redeeming qualities.? Gabriel not only gets revenge, but he has many redeeming qualities that remind us that life is both yin and yang, cowboys and outlaws, Nazis and resistance fighters. Some complain that this makes Gabriel unbelievable as a character, but not if we see him as a teacher, a symbol and ‘the tip of the spear’.