Poppet (2013) by Mo Hayder: Mo Hayder's troubled, brilliant DCI Jack Caffery continues his Major Crimes work in Bristol in this satisfying horror-procedural. Caffery again and again finds himself investigating cases that seem to be just this side of the supernatural, and Poppet keeps that going. Caffery also has a couple of problems to deal with from previous novels, but these are explained well enough that one doesn't need to have read a previous Caffery novel to understand everything that goes on.
Hayder gives us multiple third-person limited narrative focuses for Poppet. The narrative is handled deftly (though Boy, are some of the chapters short!), with Caffery and mental-institution worker AJ being the main protagonists. AJ calls Caffery in when events at his privately funded institution seem to get dangerously weird. And they are dangerously weird, and have been intermittently for years.
Poppet does a number of things tremendously well. Foremost is its sensitive treatment of catastrophic mental-health issues both through the sympathetic, haunted AJ's interactions with his patients, and partially through Poppet's plot, which does not go where it seems to be going. Hayder should get some sort of prize for not giving us the same old mentally ill boogeymen and women, or for not simply dressing up yet another impossible Joker and unleashing him on her novel.
Terrible things do happen, and marvelous things, some of the latter verging on the supernatural without necessarily getting there. Throughout it all, Caffery -- isolated, alcoholic, workaholic -- holds himself together as he also strives to follow the labyrinthine thread to the truth. Highly recommended.
Hey Nostradamus! (2004) by Douglas Coupland: So we have four narrators for the four sections of Hey Nostradamus!: Cheryl, Jason, Heather, and Reg. They narrate their parts of the story in 1988, 1999, 2003, and 2004 respectively. Cheryl and Jason were high-school lovers in 1988. Heather is Jason's girlfriend in 2003. Reg is Jason's religious fanatic father. A horrific 1988 Vancouver high-school shooting which vaguely anticipates Columbine sets the narratives in motion.
Coupland's characterization of the four narrators is deft and sympathetic, or at least empathetic. The 1988 school shooting is portrayed with a mixture of horror, black comedy, and crazed heroism on the parts of some individuals, including Jason. The media frenzy afterwards, the desire to canonize some individuals, the problems of recovering from such things -- these are all marvelously conveyed.
Douglas Coupland doesn't always get his due as a major novelist because, like Kurt Vonnegut, his novels are so easy and natural to read that the whole thing can seem effortless. Perhaps even too entertaining. Perhaps, given the often bleak but also often laugh-out-loud comic touch Vonnegut and Coupland share, the novels can seem glib.
Hey Nostradamus! isn't glib. But it goes down so smoothly that one can perhaps be forgiven for finding it too entertaining to be taken as a serious novel. But it is serious. If there's closure, it's faint and conditional and human and humane. The plot takes turns at several points that are genuinely shocking in their unexpectedness, though they always remain this side of plausible.
Morally, the novel suggests that moral or religious certainty, the certainty of absolutism, can be horrifyingly toxic. It also suggests that people can change, but not always, and not always in time for that change to be meaningful to those for whom one changed. All this comes in that compulsively readable Coupland manner, funny and witty and floating on a vast ocean of sadness. Highly recommended.
We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003): The novel's back-cover blurb makes no secret of the horror shown only at its climax -- a 1999 New York school shooting perpetrated by 15-year-old Kevin, the son of successful tourbook writer Eva Khatchadourian and advertising location scout Franklin Plaskett. There's nothing to spoiler in the bare facts. Nearly two years later, Eva struggles to make sense of her intensely problematic relationship with her now-imprisoned son in a series of letters to her "estranged husband" (so the blurb also tells us).
If it matters to the reader, Lionel Shriver is a woman -- she changed her first name in her late teens, as she hated her given name. The school shooting in the novel takes place 11 days before Columbine, and this does get repeatedly mentioned in the novel, as do a number of other real-life school shootings from the 1990's.
Anyway, it's the details of this detail-oriented novel that shouldn't be spoiled: Eva's lacerating and self-lacerating evaluations of herself and others drive the book. Is she a reliable narrator? Was Kevin born bad, made bad, or resulted from a combination of the two? Well, that's the novel, isn't it?
I note that some reviewers have referred to this novel as a "thriller," though there's nothing thrilling about it: I found it difficult to put down, but not because I was having a wild romp. You're stuck inside Eva's head for the entire novel, and that's going to be trying for a lot of readers. She isn't instantly sympathetic. I'm not entirely sure that she's even finally sympathetic, a judgement I'd extend to the two other main characters of the novel, her husband Franklin Plaskett and the eponymous Kevin.
Plaskett needs desperately to believe in the possibility of the American Dream's happy nuclear family. This desire plays out in the novel as an escalating series of what seem to be willfully ignorant (or deludedly optimistic) evaluations of Kevin's escalatingly awful actions as a child and as a teenager. But Eva's also evaluating how much these evaluations are 'real' and how much they're feigned as part of a desperate need to believe in normalcy. But Eva's also the only window into the text we've got. So we return to reliability.
Kevin himself is a marvelous creation, a Bad Seed who seems fully realized without at any point being explained. Is his growing darkness a matter of biology, upbringing, society, or all three? Is Eva's belief that there's something more recognizably and sympathetically 'human' beneath his facade of apathetic cynicism, a belief based on only a couple of incidents from Kevin's entire life, 'real' or just wishful thinking? But Eva doesn't indulge in wishful thinking in her narrative. Or doesn't appear to. Much. So we return to the evaluations the reader must make.
If Shriver hadn't already been an established mainstream novelist when she delivered this novel, I'd imagine it could only have been marketed as horror. Some reviewers seem to believe that the novel is 'useful' as part of a national (American) conversation about school shooters and what creates them. I don't think so, really, except as a warning against moral and psychological reductionism, and a warning to tread carefully when attempting to assess blame. This is real horror: unnerving, nonexploitative, harrowing, anti-cathartic for the most part, built painstakingly through the accumulation of telling, closely observed and minutely portrayed detail. Highly recommended.
