The Little Drummer Girl

The problem was the bombing of Jews in Europe by Palestinian terrorists. The plot was about a plan by the Israeli intelligence people to locate the mastermind behind recent bombings, which involved the recruitment of a politically active English actress who was given an acting role as an agent. She was to pretend to be a follower of his who was in love with him. The plan was successful; the big guy was identified and located by the agent. He realized her true role at the last moment, but then it was too late, as her employers broke in and shot him to death.

An interesting thing about the plot is that the star wasn’t a trained agent but a rootless actress. Rather than acting on stage this time, she was acting “in the theater of the real.”

June 12, 2015. Review initially written in 1991. Novel first published in 1983. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

The Lonely Londoners

This is a reflective story about the apparently aimless hard life of poor West Indians struggling to make a living in London in the fifties. It picks a set of hustling characters and tells successive stories about their encounters and experiences, at work and at poor neighborhoods and of sex with white chicks. It features interesting characters like Five, a loud-mouthed weed-smoker, Galagher, strangely feeling warm in winter and cold in summer, Captain, a Nigerian student drop-out who is too lazy for work yet stays fed all the time. Written in regional English prose; was not divided into chapters.

June 15, 2015. Review initially written in 1992. Novel first published in 1956, with the latest reprint in 1990. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

A Judgment in Stone

The education of Eunice Parchman was interrupted when she was young, so much that she failed to learn how to read and write. To make matters worse her parents rather than get this problem corrected, encouraged her to skip school and hide the fact. And so she grew up a cold but hard-working woman with no loves, who used blackmail to get things for herself. Because she couldn’t read, she was threatened by anything that might require her to read. To avoid taking on the responsibility of living alone after her parents died, because she’d have to read bills and other documents, she took up sheltered employment in the home of the Coverdales, an upper-middle-class British family, as a servant. There she tried to conceal her disability by all means.

In an effort to befriend her, Melinda Coverdale, a young college girl, discovered her problem. But rather than agree to be taught, Eunice blackmailed Melinda, which led to her (Eunice) being sacked. A day before her departure, egged on by her fanatically religious and quite mad friend Joan, Eunice and Joan shot and killed the entire family of four while they were watching TV. Joan is nearly killed in an auto accident on her way home from the murders and ended up a hospital vegetable. Eunice tried to cover up their roles in the murders, but because she couldn’t read, she ignored evidence which eventually led to her conviction.

June 11, 2015. Review initially written in 1999. Novel first published in 1977. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

The Street

A comical look at life in Brixton, London, woven around a select cast of characters. Dada of Nigerian descent is a freelance writer for a magazine for “crazy” people. He’s just fallen in love with Nehushta, also of Nigerian descent, whose father Ossie has made TV and print news for coming out of a coma after fifteen years, a period he seemed to have spent in the land of dreams. Then there is Biodun a.k.a. The Heckler, Dada’s cousin who gave up on life when his boyfriend Andre left him via death and he found out he was HIV-positive, choosing to become a street bum harassing streetside preachers, much to the consternation of his mother who then arranges a “symbolic funeral” for him.

Towards the end we learn that it is not all jolly frivolity, there’s some serious issues at stake. Dada has to come to terms with Nehushta’s other lover being a female. And The Heckler finally decides to go back to his job with a software company, though still refusing to tell his mother about his HIV status.

Like in his other story I read years ago, the author appears still to —through Dada—question the existence of God.

June 11, 2015. Review initially written in 2005. Novel first published in 1999. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

A Question of Blood

At the heart of this story is the shooting to death of two seventeen-year-olds (Anthony Jarvies and Derek Renshaw) at a private school somewhere north of Edinburgh. A third student (James Bell), only got wounded in the shoulder, while the supposed killer (Lee Herdman), an ex-Army man also shot himself. Or so it seems.

It is left to Detective Inspector John Rebus and his colleagues to dig in and unravel the mystery behind the killings. And it turns out very astonishing towards the end. It wasn’t the ex-Army man that was supposed to have gone insane for some reason that did the killing of the two, but their fellow student James who’d harbored a deep dislike for them. He it was that shot his own shoulder as a last-minute cover-up act, seeing that Lee had taken the gun that was actually his own and then unexpectedly shot himself. James not only had a grudge against his fellow mates that he felt were better off the face of the earth, but he also hated his father, a rather dubious and noisy MP and his admitting his crime in the end was to spite the man.

The idea of “blood” in the title comes from different angles. The main one was that one of the dead students, Derek, was the son of a long ignored cousin of Rebus, so was his blood and family. Different families were interlinked as the story unfolded. And the nature of Rebus’s own family and those of some of his colleagues that were formerly in the Army or forces got inspected along the way.

June 8, 2015. Review initially written in 2011. Novel last published in 2003 by Orion; ISBN 0-75285-111-X.

Year of the Uprising

This is a historical novel about the uprising of the Mashona and Matabele in then-Rhodesia in 1896 and 1897. Their land was taken from them forcefully by Rhodes and his gang, but the organized rebellion was a lesson to the whites that these people were not going to be treated like dogs and do nothing about it.

The uprising did not succeed in driving whites out of the country, but it was successful in shaking the thinking of many whites into the realization that another rebellion in the future may not end well for them. It probably set the pace for future liberation struggles and the eventual birth of a Zimbabwe governed by “natives.”

June 8, 2015. Review initially written in 1993. Novel first published in 1978. Picture source: booklikes.com.

Cosm

The creation of a strange object in the rubble of an accidental explosion in a particle physics lab at Brookhaven in the East Coast, and its being spirited secretly away for study at UCI in the West Coast by the researcher and her students, is the meat of this story. It is quickly revealed that the object the size of a basketball is a window into a new universe just formed, and for want of a better name, our enterprising researcher Alicia calls it the Cosm. A battle for ownership wages for a while between the two universities East and West, and when Alicia refuses to give up the Cosm, the East Coast school repeats her exact experiment and turns up its own Cosm II. Alicia and her team could now study Cosm I in peace. Or not so much in peace, as she has become an overnight celebrity, the creator of a universe, a goddess! While some religious freaks denounce her for playing God, the President gets curious enough to pay a visit, encouraging her to learn more.

Molded in with the scientific exploits is a quiet love affair that builds between Alicia and Max, another scientist, the one that gives her the moral and professional support in deciphering the Cosm. In the end, even the Federal government wants to take over the Cosm, for reasons of “safety,” but without knowing exactly what they would be dealing with. We are now made to consider the reality that our own universe could have come about in exactly the same way as the Cosm—as an accident—but as one of many, one that has the right ingredients to support life.

Again Alicia secretly removes the Cosm on the run, just before the Feds confiscate it, only this time it is for the best. At the termination of the life of the universe it represented, the Cosm explodes in the desert creating a huge crater, and thanks to Alicia’s action of removing it from the university grounds, there is no loss of lives apart from a federal agent or two pursuing them. Although the ending is bad for the Cosm, in losing the universe she “created,” Alicia is able to gain a man, as she and Max set to marry.

June 7, 2015. Novel first published in 1998 by Avon Books; ISBN 0-380-79052-1.