Alaska Employment Law

Restless, by William Boyd, is a terrific spy thriller with loads of tension, though not much violent action (that’s not meant as a negative).  The heroine, born Eva Delectorskaya,  was conscripted as a spy for the British in World War II after her brother (unknown to her, also a spy) was assassinated.  Living in England decades after the War, she now thinks that someone is trying to kill her.  She reveals this (as well as her true identity) to her daughter, a feisty woman in her own right, in flashback, using the journal of her counterintelligence and disinformation activities in the 1930s and 1940s that Eva specifically wrote for her daughter.  Reviewers like to use the word “crackling” to describe the tension in this excellent book, and that’s about right.  Wonderfully atmospheric noir story - and a brilliant ending.  I hated when this one ended, actually.  It would make a great film, too.

The Tin Roof Blowdown, by James Lee Burke.  Mr. Burke is right up there with Mike Connelly in that part of Borders and Barnes & Noble where “police procedurals” become “first-class fiction.”  I love this writer and his emotionally tortured recovering alcoholic cop, Dave Robicheaux.  This latest novel depicts realistically the third world nation that New Orleans became following Hurricane Katrina, and the colossal neglect of governments to deal with it.  There is also a story - it’s about the death, apparently at the hands of vigilantes, of men looting a mansion in the storm.  Good stuff.  A less intellectual read than Restless, but who wants to be an intellectual all the time?

The Spectator Bird, by Wallace Stegner.  Mr. Stegner writes beautifully about a particular marriage, in which both spouses are in their late 60s, living in California in the 1970s.  Like Restless, this story is largely told in flashback using the technique of reading a journal, this time a journal written by the husband about a trip the couple took to Denmark 20 years earlier.  (If you have been to Copenhagen, the descriptions are perfect.)  The events that transpire in Denmark are, in the end, gothic and bizarre, but they have a surprising effect upon the protagonist, the husband, and he is shaken by it.  Wallace Stegner is the real article.  This book won the National Book Award in 1977 or so.  I cannot resist quoting what the spectator bird refers to.  The couple, on their way to Denmark, are crossing the North Atlantic in heavy seas, on a ship, the Stockholm, that (as a matter of true fact) collided several years later with the Andrea Doria off Nantucket and sank her.

Once in college, trying to determine some optical truth or other, we taped distorting spectacles on a laboratory chicken and threw her some feed.  At first she would cock her head, take aim, and miss a grain of corn by as much as an inch, but after a while she learned how to correct for the astigmatism we had imposed on her, and once she got the hang of it she was as accurate as ever with either eye. Well, right now, while Ruth [his wife] sleeps and I do not, and this queasy ship carries us through the undiminished seas, I feel like a grain of corn, with the Great Chicken of the Universe standing over me taking aim.  I don’t know whether she has binocular vision or not, she may be blind in both eyes for all I know.  But she is not going to miss me when she pecks.  I have made a point of not believing in distorting spectacles.  Any hen worth a dollar can recover from them in a few hours.  Bertelson [a passenger who just died, unexpectedly, of a heart attack] probably thought he had her whammied with his sixty-five years of piety, and look what happened to him.

Moral:  You can’t trust optics, but you can depend on appetite.