By Rich Nicholls (unless otherwise noted)
Fiction
The Unknown Shore
By Patrick O'Brian. Norton. 313 pp. $23.00
I suspect that there are few now living who know as much about the 18th century as Patrick O'Brian. I know of none who can write about the period with his vigor and authority. In the 17 novels thus far published in his Aubrey/Maturin series, following the adventures of a Captain in the Royal Navy and his best friend, a sardonic ship's surgeon, during the Napoleonic Wars, O'Brian has summoned up an entire world, peopled it with a motley, ingenious cast and set out to reveal, through their varied adventures, a great deal about the ideas, habits, hopes and fears of another time. The Unknown Shore, first published in 1959, seems in many ways like a rehearsal for the later series.
It features two protagonists who are clearly ancestors of Capt. Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin: Midshipman Jack Byron, ebullient, kind-hearted, anxious for action, and surgeon's mate Tobias Barrow, somber, intelligent, with an overwhelming curiosity about the natural world. The two meet on board the "Wager," part of a British fleet setting out in 1740 to circumnavigate the globe. The "Wager" makes it no farther than the coast of South America, where she founders after a storm. A mutiny follows, and Byron and Barrow find themselves among the officers abandoned on a harsh stretch of coastline, far from home or help. A series of remarkable, but believable, adventures follow.
Perhaps the greatest surprise about this book is that O'Brian had already hit his stride as a stylist 36 years ago. One of the most distinctive features of the Aubrey/Maturin series is O'Brian's precise, beautifully cadenced prose, reminiscent of the 18th century without ever sounding quaint.
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In the Cut
By Susanna Moore. Knopf. 180 pp. $21.00
I don't believe in destiny," the narrator of Susanna Moore's unsettling new novel asserts. "I do not believe in coincidence...most behavior is neither accidental nor haphazard...I do not think that any of the things that have happened to me in the last two weeks are the result of chance." While searching for a bathroom in a neighborhood bar she has stumbled across a couple having sex, the man in shadow. The young woman is murdered that night, perhaps the victim of a serial killer. Frannie is a linguist and a teacher, single, observing with ironic detachment the twilit world of her Greenwich Village neighborhood. She is, only half reluctantly, drawn into the homicide investigation, allowing herself to drift into an affair with one of the detectives, a charming but cryptic figure who "wished to remain elusive, even to himself." He sports a tattoo much like the one she had noticed on that shadowy figure in the bar. "I can be," her lover assures her, "whatever you want me to be."
In all things but sex (their encounters, described in a startlingly frank and precise manner, are among the most graphic in recent fiction), he is wary of her, dismissive. "I reminded myself," the narrator notes in passing, that men "have to despise us in order to come near us, in order to overcome their terrible fear of us."
She is attacked on a dark street, possibly by the murderer. Other men -- a disaffected friend who seems to want to confess something, a student angered by her work on a dictionary of street slang ("People like you think the brothers are guinea pigs") -- seem increasingly odd, menacing. If Frannie, proud of her "incautious adaptability," of her skill at reaching precise answers ("You're always looking for something more," her lover tells her, "and sometimes you get it wrong") really doesn't believe in chance, what does her increasingly dangerous situation mean? Does she want an answer, or is she allowing herself to become the killer's next victim? Susanna Moore has written a ferociously powerful erotic thriller illuminating, in a language both terse and resonant, the manner in which passion, anger and madness can converge.
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Don't Die Before
You're Dead
By Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Random House. 415 pp. $25.00
While he is best known as a poet (he has published 42 collections of verse) Yevgeny Yevtushenko is also a vigorous and original novelist, as Don't Die Before You're Dead, about the events surrounding the attempted coup in Russia in 1991, demonstrates. The narrative adroitly mixes the experiences of a varied cast of fictional characters caught up in the coup with portraits of a number of actual figures, including the plotters, Boris Yeltsin, Mikhail Gorbachev and even Yevtushenko himself. There are some wonderfully staged scenes in Moscow as the opposing sides, almost equally submerged in confusion, jockey for position. The tense hours leading up to the coup's collapse, as the demonstrators surrounding Yeltsin in Moscow waited with a mingled sense of defiance and fatalism for the Army to attack, are described here with a gripping, vivid particularity.
Yevtushenko has always been a wonderful mimic of voices, and that talent is on display here. The large cast remains distinct, memorable. Indeed, many of Yevtushenko's fictional characters exhibit greater complexity than his portraits of the public men and women who staged or opposed the coup. There is one problem: Don't Die seems at times to fall uncomfortably between genres, wavering from novel to memoir. This happens when Yevtushenko steps back from the action to hector those of his fellow citizens who have (he thinks) misrepresented his actions during and after the coup. These outbursts disrupt the action but, fortunately, they are infrequent. Don't Die Before You're Dead is, for the most part, a stirring celebration of one of those rare moments when something essential seemed to be decided.
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