The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I had a plan for tonight’s post, but after a conversation with my son I’ve decided to refine it further and write it another day. Unfortunately, that leaves me with not a lot other than bitching about how insanely fucking hot it is outside and various other forms of electronic begging for death.
Anyway, now that I’ve failed at that, time to go finish the last Robert Jordan book I ever have to read.
I actually only had one five-star read in August, which was Tana French’s The Keeper, Book of the Month by default, although Daggermouth has grown in my estimation since I read it.
These four Tana French books are a completed trilogy and a standalone novel, and you will never guess which one is the standalone novel, and I want to have a quick sit-down with whatever filthy jackanapes were involved in making cover decisions over at Viking.
About the same as last month, and I’m going to take a serious beating in September, because there are a ton of new releases this month that are already pre-ordered. I need an extra three or four hours a day if I want to keep up.
I need someone to have a quiet word with Tana French. And maybe with her publishers. Hell, both.
The Keeper is the third and, supposedly, the final book in the Cal Hooper trilogy. I did a full review of the first book, The Searcher, and a reviewlet of the second, The Hunter. There is something great about this series, y’all, and I refuse to admit that it’s over in a fashion that rarely happens to me with series fiction. I absolutely insist on more books in this series, or at least that French starts a new series where she follows Trey as she moves on from Ardnakelty. It’s not like her Dublin Murder Squad series didn’t already establish a precedent for each book following a side character from the previous one. I love these characters and I love this setting, and God damn it, I’m not ready for or interested in this being over yet.
But let me back up, for the benefit of people who haven’t been reading this site since 2021 and don’t click on links: the Cal Hooper books follow, you guessed it, Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago cop who moves to Ireland on a whim in the first book and buys a fixer-upper in the tiny and fictional town of Ardnakelty. He quickly finds himself more or less adopted by a feral thirteen-year-old girl named Trey, and … well, he’s an ex-cop. It’s a Tana French book. There are shenanigans afoot. By the start of the third book, Cal is engaged to a local woman named Lena, Trey is seventeen and effectively Cal’s foster daughter, and Cal no longer feels like an outsider to Ardnakelty. In fact, the idea of not becoming part of Ardnakelty is a major theme in this book; Lena feels like Cal is growing too comfortable with the more pathological aspects of living in such a small town, and Trey, who was all about escaping Ardnakelty at her earliest possible opportunity at first, is contemplating leaving school for a carpentry apprenticeship and is tentatively exploring a relationship with a girlfriend.
And then a local girl, right around Trey’s age, is found drowned in a river, and the autopsy reveals antifreeze in her stomach, and we’re off to the races again.
Perhaps “off to the races” is the wrong phrase. This book is many things; in a hurry is none of them, and while it’s every bit as compelling a read as the previous two volumes, this one is even more about the three main characters and the culture of Ardnakelty than the first books were, and the plot is really an excuse to dive into their personalities and their relationships. There’s an intentionality about Cal’s relationship with Trey in particular that I, as someone with a couple of pseudo-adoptive kids of my own*, can really recognize and relate to, and Lena comes forward quite a bit more in this book than she has in the past.
Ardnakelty itself is much more of a character in this book than it has been in the past, too, and the way the book uses Rachel Holohan’s death to investigate themes of inheritance and change and destiny is really awesome. I’m not quite ready to call this French’s best book, something I also said about The Searcher, but it’s a tremendous piece of work and it really makes me want to reread the series from the start. If you’ve read the previous books you no doubt already have your eye on this one, but if you haven’t, at this point there’s no reason to wait.
(*) I don’t talk about them often, but I have two former students who call me Dad and mean it, and a handful who have tossed the word around a couple of times.
WordPress just inserted an apostrophe into “Pahlavis,” and did it again right there, and it makes me want to fight someone.
I finished this tonight, and I got home from work intending to finish it quickly, but got sidetracked by some– ahem– electrical work in the shell of our old closet, so when I say “I finished this tonight,” a more accurate statement would be “I finished this ten minutes ago,” and given that it’s already almost 9:00 I maybe should have found something else to post about, because this book probably deserves more careful consideration than I’m about to give it. So take that into account; I’m kind of rushing here.
The short review: this was an excellent read, and right on the edge of being detailed enough that I constantly felt like I was learning things without burying me in details and Farsi words and names– although the fact that the two Shah Reza Pahlavis and the Crown Prince Reza have nearly identical names definitely caused some trouble at times– but I am not convinced that Andrew Scott Cooper is as unbiased as perhaps a historian might strive to be. Entertainingly, this has managed to slip into the official Goodreads description of the book:
The book’s page on Amazon has “immersive, gripping” before “account,” and otherwise is identical, so someone is playing shenanigans here, but the fact is that Cooper really seems to like the Shah, and tries really hard to make everything that happened in Iran seem like it wasn’t his fault. (To be clear: every time in this post I say “the Shah,” I’m referring to the middle Pahlavi, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the son of the first Shah Pahlavi and the father of the Crown Prince. He occupies most of the book’s attention.)
Iranian history, even fairly recent Iranian history, is fantastically complicated, and I think particularly for Americans, who maybe like things to be able to be boiled down to “who is the good guy?” and “who is the bad guy?” too much, it’s already difficult enough to sort out motivations and moral culpability in Iran in the twentieth century without an author putting his thumb on the scale. Every novel I’ve ever read about Iran during this time period has more or less treated the Ayatollah Khomeini as an irredeemable evil, which I don’t have a problem with, and have cast Mohammad Mossadegh as a sort of savior figure who almost saved Iran from the Shah. Pahlavi managed to be perhaps the best example history has of the “enlightened despot,” someone who genuinely wanted to liberalize and modernize his country, educating his people, raising the standard of living, and ensuring rights for women and religious minorities … except he did it by forbidding dissent and trampling all over most people who disagreed with him … except when he didn’t, and The Fall of Heaven is really quick to assert that the Shah was almost pacifistic in his refusal to shed Iranian blood in the pursuit of his goals.
I think a lot of the Iranian novelists whose books I have read– not that there are a ton, but there have been several– would disagree with that, but then the biggest counterpoint is that he let Khomeini live, which … God damn, having that fucker shot in the sixties would have saved Iran, Pahlavi and the entire world a whole lot of trouble. And there was a weird overlap between leftist critics of Pahlavi, who tended to like the liberalization stuff except they didn’t really believe he meant it, and wanted democracy, and the religious lunatics who thought he was too liberal and wanted Iran to be the theocratic hellhole that it eventually became under the Ayatollahs. It’s messy as fuck, is what I’m saying, and when you throw in things like leftist women walking around in chador to demonstrate that they were against the regime, and the fact that somehow the CIA thought that Khomeini would lead a moderate, secular government … God, nobody knows anything about this place.
One way or another: this was a worthy read, despite having some issues. I’d recommend if you want to learn more about Iran that you start with some fiction– I’d recommend anything by Marjan Kamali— and maybe then move on to this. But it’s well worth the time you’ll invest in it.
It was another long day— I’m still having a great time with this new group of kids, mind you, but seven classes in a row is gonna take a toll– and I want to play video games. So I’m just going to throw a quick book question at everyone and take the night off.
If you pick up Book Three of a trilogy, and it’s significantly shorter– like, a couple hundred pages shorter– than Book One and Book Two, do you feel like that’s a sign that the author has lost interest in the story? Asking because that actually happened today and my reaction upon seeing the book was “Dude, are you serious?”
You, uh, might have heard that Sarah J. Maas had a couple of announcements today.
I got a text from The Friend I Talk About Books With around 1:00 in the afternoon, which I can only assume was milliseconds after the titles and covers for ACOTAR 6 and 7 were released. I had to ignore said texts until I got home, at which point our conversation reminded me that I probably need to reread this whole fucking series before I read the new books, and I also very much need to wait for both of them to come out and then read both of them back-to-back. And apparently the spider on the cover of ACOFM is hinting to people that the Throne of Glass series, my favorite of Maas’ work, is being folded into the ACOTAR universe somehow?
Y’all, I don’t have time to reread ACOTAR, and I definitely don’t have time to reread ToG, which is 5,000 pages all on its own. I’ve got four more Wheel of Time books, probably right around 4K pages all by themselves. I’ve got four more Temeraire books. I have fourteen fucking Realm of the Elderlings books that I was going to dive into once I got WoT and Temeraire knocked out. I do not have time for this. I need y’all– and by y’all I mean every writer in the world, and yes, I’m looking directly at you, Adrian Tchaikovsky– to just … stop, for a while, while I get caught up. Either that or I need my job to agree to keep paying me for doing my job without me actually doing my job, so that I can just sit at home and read.
Anyway, I’m going to hit Publish on this and then go see how much of the history of the Iranian monarchy I’m reading right now I can get finished by bed. Tomorrow I’m going to tell my students to stfu and leave me alone because I have books to finish.
Christ.