I recently received an advanced reader’s copy of The White Mary by Kira Salak to review from the publisher, Henry Holt. I was excited to learn of the novel, as I was an avid fan of Salak’s wonderful non-fictional narrative of her kayaking tour to Timbuktu, “The Cruelest Journey”.

Salak is a unique phenomenon and a wild spirit – traveling alone as a woman to places most men would be afraid to go in a group. Her non-fiction travel works capture the fear, wonder, and strangeness of traveling alone, a sort of female incarnation of Paul Theroux. I was looking forward to her first fictional work (although one wonders just how fictional it is, exactly). I was not disappointed.

The White Mary tells the tale of Marika Vecera, a journalist/war correspondent. The early parts of novel intertwine her experiences in Zaire reporting on genocide with a somewhat mysterious journey through the jungles of Papua New Guinea. We eventually learn that Marika is chasing the ghost of Robert Lewis, a journalist she worships and who inspired her career. She’s also chasing some ghosts of her own; her time in Zaire has scarred her deeply. The White Mary is in fact an extraordinarily powerful portrait of a person who has “seen too much”. Marika’s near-death experience in the Congo has left her emotionally numb, and walled off from the care of those closest to her. Salak’s rendering of Marika’s psychological problems is done in pitch-perfect detail. The novel is sometimes adult, brutal and violent, and not for early teens or the faint of heart.

Just as folk musicians perform songs in pairs, it’s sometimes interesting to read & review books in pairs. At the same time as I was reading The White Mary, I was also consuming “The Painter of Battles” by the renowned author Arturo Perez-Reverte (one of my favorite authors). The Painter of Battles covers very similar territory in some respects –
the protagonist there has “seen too much” as a war photographer and has given way to despair, retiring to paint a battle that spans all historical battles, and to avoid all human interaction (interestingly one of the key characters in The White Mary is a war photographer). Where the Painter of Battles is deeply philosophical and contemplative, the White Mary is visceral; the Painter of Battles is carefully drawn, exquisitely written and intriguing to read. And yet, three weeks later, the Painter of Battles is not finished, and The White Mary yielded in two sittings. It’s that compelling; I had to finish it. Perez-Reverte’s prose is smoother and more ornate, even in translation (or perhaps because of it), whereas Salak’s prose is more muscular and direct. The writing in The White Mary is occasionally awkward but still compares favorably with that of such a distinguished author as Perez-Reverte.

Salak’s Marika is an extraordinarily well-drawn character; I never doubted her reality for a moment. And Salak regularly captures one of the key aspects of travel – the shock of experiencing fundamentally different cultural assumptions. Marika for example, is sent to the “women’s hut” when she is menstruating, where she rages at the artificial and (to her, of course) ludicrous belief system that requires it. Marika’s progress through something like post-traumatic stress disorder is carefully and believably painted, and you root for her to come back even as she spirals downward in self-destructive behavior.

In short, the White Mary is a powerful and gripping first novel, a cautionary tale full of danger, travel, and adventure, and at the same time gives deep insight into the human condition.

(If you’d like to explore the geography of The White Mary, I’ve plotted many of the locations mentioned in my Books/Google Maps mashup, CodexMap.

The Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson, created a minor sensation in the literary world when it went out for bid in 2007. Reportedly, early bids of $1 million were declined. Doubleday eventually came out the winner. Responding to a banner ad from Publisher’s Lunch, I was fortunate enough to receive an Advance Readers Copy, prior to the book’s August 5, 2008 release.

The narrator of The Gargoyle (it seems that he’s consciously never named by the author) had a troubled childhood, and has grown into full-bore bad guy: Pornographer, Drug Addict, and, as the story opens, a Very Impaired Driver on a mountain road. Mysteriously, a volley of burning arrows flies across the road and in front of the car (are they real? hallucinated? Flying through a warp in the space-time continuum?). One too many over-reactions on the Narrator’s part, and he and his car are plunging down the mountainside, toward a crash and an inferno.

By the top of page 3, the narrator is on fire.

The opening of the Gargoyle is like a stiff Scotch, accidentally swallowed down the wrong pipe. It burns going down (you’ll pardon the metaphor), with fumes all up your nose, and you’ll want to take a deep breath. And like a great scotch, once the first drink settles, you’ll want more:

I imagine, dear reader, that you’ve had some experience with heat. Perhaps you’ve tipped a boiling kettle at the wrong angle and the steam crept up your sleeve….I want you to imagine something new…Imagine turning on one of the elements of your stove – let’s say it’s the electric kind with the black coils on top. Don’t put a pot of water on the element because the water only absorbs the heat….a slight violet tinge will appear, nestled there in the black rings, and then the element assumes some reddish-purple tones, like unripe blackberries. It moves towards orange, and finally – finally! – an intense glowing red. Kind of beautiful, isn’t it? Now lower your head so that your eyes are even with the top of the old stove and you can peer through the shimmering waves rising up…..I want you to trace the fingertips of your left hand gently across your right palm, noting the way your skin registers even the lightest touch. If some else were doing it, you might even be turned on. Now, slam that sensitive, responsive hand directly onto the glowing element.

And hold it there. Hold it there as the element scorches Dante’s nine rings right into your palm, allowing you to grasp Hell in your hand forever. Let the heat engrave the skin, the muscles, the tendons; let it smolder down to the bone. Wait for the burn to embed itself so far into you that you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to let go of that coil. It won’t be long until the stench of your own burning flesh wafts up, grabbing your nose hairs and refusing to let go, and you smell your body burn….I want you to do one more thing….lean down, turn your head to one side, and slap your check against that same element. I’ll let you choose which side of your face…Now you might have some idea of what it was like for me to be pinned inside that car…

Clearly Davidson has made a deep study of burns and their treatment. On occasion his hypnotic renderings of fire make you wonder if he played with matches too much as a child. Davidson gives all the gory details (literally) of burn treatment, the methods, rationales, and dangers. We follow the Narrator into the hospital and follow his recovery, where he is eventually discovered by Marianne Engle, who appears to be a somewhat deranged artist that likes to sculpt in the nude. Marianne apparently knows our Narrator from the Middle Ages (she apparently has a very long lifespan which our Narrator does not). Marianne attends to our Narrator during his recovery, and begins a Scheherazade-like series of tales involving….well, you’ll need to read the book for those. Along the way, the Narrator also acquires a metaphorical (or is it?) Snake: a voice of self doubt and the personification of Morphine addiction.

The series of tales start in the Middle Ages in Germany, and wend their way into other times and locations, including the aforementioned Hell of Dante. The two-track structure of the novel, alternating between modern times and the Middle Ages, is often reminiscent of Crichton’s Timeline. Yet Crichton’s time-travel has a meticulous and well-articulated (if speculative) mechanism for this time duality. I never felt a clear grasp of the intended mechanism in the Gargoyle, and as a result had some trouble achieving Coleridge’s state of “willing suspension of disbelief” required for fantasy to really work to the fullest extent.

The “Tales of a Thousand and One Nights” structure generally works well and is quite entertaining. This is a first novel, and a fine one – but in places the book feels forced, and I found some of the transitions from one tale to the next to be artificial and abrupt. And some of the stories seem a bit unmotivated and arbitrary. In particular, the Viking interlude featuring Sigurðr, while thoroughly enjoyable, in the end doesn’t seem to really take the book anywhere. Nonetheless the prose is crisp throughout – the occasional awkwardness comes more from the structure of the story than from the language, which is often quite powerful. As the stories progress, I often found myself trying to figure out who was re-incarnated, and who was not? But perhaps that is part of the experience….

The primary criticism of the novel that I have is that the transformation of the Narrator from Bad Guy into what he becomes seems to happen off-camera, as it were – I did not feel as though I was really participating in the internal dialog, the wrenching psychological changes that occur to the Narrator, until near the end of the book.

Those criticisms aside, the book was wonderful fun. Marianne is rendered larger than life – wild hair, flashing green eyes, carving grotesques and sleeping on them in the nude. The Snake is an ever-present voice, whispering poison into the Narrator’s ear (or mind) – a wonderful manifestation of the self doubt we all feel at times. The novel is sprinkled throughout with wonderful historical asides and filled with arcane Medieval history – the history of German translations of Dante, the parallels between Dante’s cosmography and the views and trials of Galileo, and the fundamental strangeness of Medieval German Christian Mysticism via the mortifications of the flesh and self-flagellation. And of course, Gargoyles, and how they are different from Grotesques (you probably have them mixed up, you know – if it doesn’t channel water, it’s not a Gargoyle, it’s a Grotesque). It’s an entertaining read. It has a few rough edges, but read it – I don’t think you’ll regret it.