Spoils by Brian Van Reet
After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Brian Van Reet dropped out of college to join the army and was deployed in Iraq, where he won a bronze star for valour. His debut novel follows the experiences of a raw recruit, the rather portentously named Cassandra Wigheard, as her platoon races towards Baghdad in the opening days of the Iraq war. With Saddam Hussein’s army fleeing, it looks as if the invasion will be an easy ride.
However, a ragtag band of mujahidin fighters have other ideas. Their story is told through the eyes of a weary old Islamist, Abu al-Hool. Though he has an impeccable jihadi CV (he’s fought everywhere from Eritrea to Chechnya), al-Hool is plagued with the sort of religious doubts that are usually associated with the more sensitive members of the Anglican clergy. He’s also sceptical of the egocentric, propaganda-obsessed Dr Walid, who has just outmanoeuvred him to become leader of their group.
Van Reet spends the first third of the book manoeuvring al-Hool and Cassandra across the wastelands of the Middle East, lining them up for the inevitable rendezvous. This part of the novel is curiously lacking in narrative conviction. We are bounced listlessly around the desert and shown the predictable war-tourist snapshots: barbecued Iraqi tanks, Saddam’s gold-plated loo and so on. When al-Hool and his insurgent group finally collide with Cassandra’s squad, the results are anticlimactic. Cassandra is knocked unconscious and we’re never shown the book’s crucial battle, which seems like an inexplicable missed opportunity.
The novel’s prose is hobbled by Van Reet’s curious twin addiction to military acronyms and elaborately archaic vocabulary. In the first 50 pages alone I spotted a string of soldierly jargon: AO, PX, MEPS, CLP, QRF and so forth. If, like me, your combat experience extends no farther than the odd pre-adolescent game of Laser Quest, you will occasionally find yourself wondering what the hell Van Reet is on about. It does, though, help to create an atmosphere of realism.
Less forgivable is the author’s love of outmoded or unnecessarily fancy words. Thus a crocodile is a “strange saurian creature”, one character longs for “thanatological decorum”, and another declares himself “exilient”.
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Van Reet knows his subject and is often very good on the sheer strangeness of war. Nevertheless, his reluctance to show us combat first hand and his obsession with highfalutin vocabulary makes Spoils a strangely fastidious attempt to turn war into fiction.
James Marriott
Jonathan Cape, 272pp, £12.99
Defectors by Joseph Kanon
With Defectors, his eighth novel, Joseph Kanon continues to demonstrate that he is up there with the very best of the present crop of spy thriller writers. No one offers a more convincing portrait of the shivery atmosphere of Cold War eastern Europe and a paranoid America. His interests are not so much the grand events and flamboyant heroes and villains of the period; he is the master of the shadows of the era. Comparisons with Alan Furst and John le Carré are not out of place.
In 1949 Frank Weeks, a top official in the recently formed CIA, shocked the US by defecting to Stalin’s Russia. It is now 1961. His brother Simon, who had to abandon his career in the State Department because of Frank’s treachery, has become a publisher.
Simon arrives in Moscow with the task of editing Frank’s memoirs for the US market, where it is certain to be a bestseller. The KGB has given its consent, but insists on vetting its contents. Simon worries that the book will turn out to be propaganda, but cannot resist the opportunity to meet his brother for the first time since his flight. During the visit Simon discovers that Frank’s invitation to edit the book is a smokescreen to hide a more complicated and dangerous plan.
The community of western defectors in Moscow — who include Guy Burgess and other English traitors — are portrayed as unhappily drinking their lives away, rarely mixing with Russian society except at the Bolshoi ballet. Frank’s wife, Joanna, is movingly drawn as an alcoholic. She was once Simon’s sexy lover and perhaps wishes she still was.
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At one level Defectors is the compassionate story of the two brothers awkwardly trying to overcome the effect of Frank’s actions on Simon and their father. Yet Frank may be too far into his world of lying and deception to respond to brotherly love.
It is also a frightening, convincing portrait of the state’s capacity to control every aspect of the lives of its subjects and even its visitors. The sinister bodyguard Boris is to be present at every discussion between the brothers; only rarely can they escape his eyes and ears.
Kanon writes beautifully, superbly conveying human sadness and regret. There is a hint of nostalgia in his depiction of the Moscow milieu of the defectors. He is almost saying: defection isn’t what it used to be. Marcel Berlins
Simon & Schuster, 290pp, £14.99
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
Coming at the same time as the return of Twin Peaks, this novel shares some of the tropes of the cult TV series: a missing girl, a deep commitment to place and, at times, an interminably sleepy pace.
“They gathered at the car park in the hour before dawn and waited to be told what to do.” So begins this apparently unsolvable mystery of the disappearance of 13-year-old Rebecca Shaw, 5ft tall with straight, dark-blond, shoulder-length hair who was last seen wearing a white hooded top. Shaw’s family were outsiders staying at the “Hunter place”.
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This is bleak moorland, pockmarked by reservoirs, and there are plenty of suspects. At first we think we are in line for a whodunnit — or least a whydunnit — as locals are interviewed and human weaknesses laid starkers, but soon, as the body refuses to turn up, the novel nods less to Line of Duty and more to The Archers and Springwatch.
This is not the anatomy of a murder, but rather the minutes of a community after an unexplained loss, from the police reconstruction early on to the missing girl’s father’s sponsored walks years down the line. Jon McGregor, a writer of elegance and poetry, leads us through the seasons, year after year, caring more about a description of a trout or a badger near the vanishing point as the whereabouts of the girl.
We follow the coming-of-age of the boy who said he had fancied her and the other local children whom Rebecca apparently knew so little, as well as the ageing adults: the leavers, the remainers, the broken marriages, those still angry about the curse on their patch.
I am a fan of McGregor — he is rightly the serial winner of important literary prizes for novels such as If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things — but Reservoir 13 is a frustrating read. The decision to include such a large, soapish community cast, then attempt to interest us in their domestic manoeuvres — interspersed with some repetitive nature walks — left me wishing he would place Rebecca back at the centre and give us, if not a corpse and a killer, more of a reason to read on. Alex O’Connell
Fourth Estate, 325pp, £14.99
