On things lost….

David Adam Richards’ Lost Highway (not to be confused with what I found to be one of David Lynch’s weakest films) is a masterpiece. Its sort of an upscale version of A Simple Plan. Things just go wronger. Essentially good, if misguided men, find themselves more than contemplating evil acts. In this case, it is the lost high way.

Richards is without a doubt one of Canada’s, and by extension, the world’s great novelists. His style runs that same form of realism of Charles Dickens, Robertson Davies and John Irving. And though his mastery of all the basic elements of storytelling would be enough to set him apart, what really distinguishes him is his selection of characters. He writes of a place, and thus has been often compared to Faulkner, and it is a place of rural roughness, of people poor. What also is special about his stories is that they are miserable yet enthralling, depressing page turners. It is not uncommon to find people devoted to undermining others to no personal advantage; its just what they do, and they will do it for generations.

The Lost Highway is very good, and so is Mercy Among the Children and River of the Brokenhearted.

And also in the lost files, author of Book of Lost Things, John Connolly writes on his blog of the never ending dismissal of genre writing, this time taking place at a place where it shouldn’t, which might in fact be the Harbour festival in Toronto.

A young American novelist, one whom I can only hope was drunk at the time, commences a spectacularly ignorant attack on genre fiction. Even allowing for any possible intake of alcohol, she is quite stunningly rude. Her basic argument, if I understand it correctly, is that mystery fiction works according to a basic template: in her immortal words, “something happens …”

Once I have managed to lock my jaw back into place, I try to follow her argument to its logical conclusion. If the criticism of mystery fiction is that something happens, then the defence of her particular brand of literary fiction must be that nothing happens. I try to recall the last time I enjoyed a narrative in which nothing happened, and, eventually, admit failure. Even Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (a play of which it was famously remarked that nothing happens – twice) is full of incident, and that is as close as I can get to an apparently uneventful narrative that works.

Some just stay lost it seems…and while we are on the topic of genre fiction, keep an eye out for this one:

My first real German mystery/thriller. One of my all time favourites is the Berlin Noir trilogy by Phillip Kerr but he wasn’t quite German. Christian Von Ditfurth who is a German historian has written a number of books featuring the bepained (he suffers from some sort of arthritis) Stachelmann who is one of those happenstance investigators, an academic who as an expert on Nazi history becomes a resource for his friend in the homicide department when a case comes up which may be rooted in the past. and that particular murky past.

Many mystery characters are self doubting but Stachelmann takes it to another level. Though hardly physically prepossessing, he is near fearless in the hunt, but in his everyday existence he is an academic who feels himself a terrible fraud, and believes that he will be found out soon. This book is the first, and the only one translated to date so I don’t know where that theme is taken. But if not a great book, it is a very good one, and the history is as one would suspect, very well done.