Novel types

Review: The Shadow of the Crescent Moon

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The Shadow of the Crescent Moon is the first novel by Fatima Bhutto, who is the granddaughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the former President and Prime Minister of Pakistan, whose sister was Benazir Bhutto.  Fatima Bhutto graduated from Columbia University in 2004.  She lives in Karachi, and is a freelance writer.  Interestingly, her website does not mention this book.  Instead, it mentions three other books.  Judging by one article on her website, she seems to be a political radical.

The Shadow of the Crescent Moon is an interesting novel, relatively brief and quite intense.  It is set in the tribal region of northwest Pakistan and involves three brothers who are preparing to celebrate Eid, the Muslim feast at the end of Ramadan.  The oldest son has decided to leave his childhood sweetheart and go into business away from his home town of Mir Ali.  The middle son has become a doctor in Mir Ali and the youngest has joined his brother’s sweetheart as an insurgent.  In the novel, Mir Ali is the focal point for the armed struggle between Pakistan’s army and local people who crave their own freedom.

Fatima Bhutto does a very good job describing the culture, the issues, the people and the setting.  One gets the sense of a long-running, life-and-death struggle in the northwest of Pakistan.  It is clear that the author’s sentiments are with the insurgents.

I found the novel frustrating in the sense that it lacks focus.  There is an insurgent plot to kill a minister, and the story seems to be headed to a climax there, but the novel ends in uncertainty.  Was he killed?  Who killed him?  Or if not, why not?  There is some uncertainty as to who the insurgents are.  Some are Taliban; some are ordinary people.  What is the relationship between them?  The Pakistani government is clearly an evil influence, but in a book like this which is somewhat polemical, it would be a redeeming feature to hint more broadly at what the government should do differently (other than bringing in local conscripts).  There are also some religious issues: notably Sunnis vs. Shiites, but there are problems for Christians and Hindus, as well.  How do these issues fit into the over-arching themes of justice and freedom?

Ms. Bhutto’s writing in quite engaging.  Occasionally, there is a too long sentence which requires a second reading to gain understanding.  And, like all ‘young, modern authors’ she likes to use unconventional words rather than the conventional.  Mostly, this works well, but there is the occasional grating which disturbs the flow.  The characterisation of the two older brothers, the female sweetheart and the Pakistani colonel are all clear and intriguing.  The character of the youngest brother – the insurgent – is somewhat opaque.  We can understand why the two older brothers do what they do, but what – apart from his father’s lectures – motivates this brother to be an insurgent?

An interesting book and a particularly interesting author. I’m sure we’ll hear more from her!

Sable Shadow and The Presence

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My fifth novel, Sable Shadow & The Presence, has just been published.

 Photo

The publisher’s press release says the following:

“Is the Voice You Hear Your Conscience, Or Is It Something Else? 
From an early age, Henry Lawson hears voices. He attributes one to the Sable Shadow, a confidant of the devil, and the other to The Presence, a representative of God.  He believes his life becomes a “board game” between these two powerful influences. 
Sable Shadow & The Presence is the fictional autobiography of a bright, but introverted and slightly insecure young man, one who studies the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre.  He begins to see life in existential terms, although this does not infringe on his rudimentary Christian beliefs. Upon Henry’s entry into the business world, he receives vital guidance from Sable Shadow, and advances to a high corporate level. With his career nearly at its peak, Henry suffers a series of devastating tragedies and attempts suicide. With the help of his wife and a psychiatrist, with whom he engages in philosophical dialogue, he constructs a completely new identity to overcome his past.  But will this identity escape the influence of Sable Shadow? 
This thought-provoking, psychological novel is rich in triumph and tragedy, success and failure, good and evil. It is a modern day look at Paradise Lost.”

I would recommend it, if:

  • you like biography (this is a fictional autobiography)
  • you are interested in philosophy (layman’s level, not academic level)
  • you’ve wondered what existentialism is all about
  • you are interested in what it takes to get ahead (and fail) in the corporate world
  • you have a layman’s interest in theology
  • you think you might be interested in Henry Lawson’s theory of how to succeed in life

or

  • if you’re just interested in a good story

 

“Let Children Pick Their Own Books”

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“There is no such thing as a bad book for children,” says author Neil Gaiman, best-selling writer and Carnegie Medal-winner.  He was delivering the second annual Reading Agency lecture at London’s Barbican on October 14.  He said that compelling children to read books deemed appropriate by adults will leave them convinced that reading is ‘uncool and unpleasant’. . . There are no bad authors for children that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. . . . They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories.  A hackneyed worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed or worn out to them.  This is the first time the child has encountered it. . . . Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing.  Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer. . . . Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love  of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian ‘improving’ literature.”  My own recent experience with children’s reading involves my grandchildren.  In Sicily this past summer, I brought along two illustrated books: one of Aesop’s fables and the other of fairy tales.  After dinner, I offered to read to them.  One grandson, in particular, was very keen to listen.  He would select one book or the other, pick out a particular story, and comment on it after I had read it (or even during the reading).  His younger brother and sister were interested, initially, but they preferred other occupations. More recently, I read bedtime stories to two other grandsons, aged 5 and 3.  They each picked out a book they wanted me to read.  (They had to take turns.)  The older one picked out a child’s book that would have been difficult for a thirteen-year-old to follow.  (It was a compilation of ancient fairy tales in ancient language.)  I pointed out that it maybe he wouldn’t like it so much, but he insisted that I carry on with the reading, perhaps because he wanted to get an idea of what older children liked to read.  After about the third tale, he selected another book.  His younger brother wanted to be read to, also, but his idea of being read to was to explore illustrated pop-up books, and comment on them. I can remember when I was about thirteen, there was a paperback novel called The Amboy Dukes in which my classmates were highly interested.  I was told, when I finally got a copy, was that the cover illustration was two teenagers having sex.  This seemed rather doubtful, as both the boy and the girl were dressed.  I remember showing the book to my mother, and pointing out the cover illustration.  She, too, was sceptical, but she made no other comment.  But, I decided to read it, in case there were salacious sections.  There weren’t.  It was boring.  King Arthur was much more interesting.

Review: Restless

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William Boyd’s Restless won the Costa Novel Award in 2006, and when I found a copy in our small library in Sicily (it had probably been left by a guest), I decided I had to read it.  The reviews on the cover were effusive in their praise.  For example, The Times was quoted on the front cover as saying: “Boyd is a first-rate storyteller and this is a first-rate story . . . An utterly absorbing page-turner.”

The setting of the novel is the early years of World War II, when Britain and Russia were fighting against Nazi Germany alone, and the US had not entered the war.  The central female characters are Eva Delectorskaya and her daughter, Ruth.  The chapters alternate between Ruth telling her side of the story, in the first person, from 1947 onwards, and Eva’s story being told in the third person from 1935 until 1941.  Ruth does not know her mother as Eva; she knows her as Sally Gilmartin, née Fairchild.  She also didn’t know that her mother was half Russian, half English, and was living in Paris, age 28, when the war broke out in 1939.  The principal male character is Lucas Romer, who recruits Eva into a special branch of the British Secret Service.  Eva is beautiful and fluent in Russian, English and French.  After being recruited and trained in Scotland, one expects that Eva will be parachuted into France to work alongside the French resistance.  But we learn – partly through the files that Eva/Sally passes to her daughter and partly from Eva herself – that she has been recruited into an organisation which attacks Germany through the media.  The stories that the organisation places are sometimes fabrications and sometimes exaggerations or little-noticed Nazi misdeeds. In 1940, the organisation, including Lucas and Eva, move to New York City, where their focus shifts to persuading a reluctant American people to join the war against Germany.  Eva and Lucas become lovers, and for Eva, Lucas is the perfect secret agent: brilliant, and devious, but devastatingly attractive.  Of course, they succeed in persuading the White House to go to war, but just before Pearl Harbor, Eva is sent on a mission during which she is nearly killed.  Suspecting everyone, including Lucas, she goes onto hiding: first in Canada and then in England.  Years later, as an old woman, she persuades Ruth to help her unmask the traitor.

What could be a better story?

What I particularly liked about it was the subversive activity involving the use of the media.  One wouldn’t expect media people to be literally assassins, but when one is a traitor and one has to prevent something from happening, one uses strong measures.  The daughter who doesn’t know the truth about her mother, who discovers it during the course of the novel, and who collaborates with her in realising the conclusion, is another appealing feature.  The story is very well-written – not in a literary style – but in straight-forward, clear language.

The only faults I could find were what seemed to be a little bit of ‘filler material’ about Ruth’s occupation: teaching English as a second language to business people.  I also wasn’t clear about what actually happened during Ruth’s nearly-fatal mission.  Somehow, it didn’t all fit together.

But having said that Restless is a first rate thriller, and if you decide to pick it up, be sure you haven’t any pressing engagements: it’s difficult to put it down.

Book review: Aleph

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I’ve been on holiday in Sicily for almost three weeks, so I had some time to do a little reading.  (The weather, the sea, the beaches and, most importantly, the company were all very nice.)  At the news stand/book store in the main square of Capo d’Orlando, I had a look through their collection of English language books, which are to be found in the darkest inner recesses of the store, mixed in with German language books. Aleph, by Paulo Coelho, a popular and well-regarded Brazilian author, caught my eye.  I had read his Eleven Minutes some time ago, and I was impressed.  It is the allegorical story of a young girl who, through her failures to achieve true love, goes to Switzerland where she becomes a successful prostitute.  But then she meets and falls in love with Ralf, an artist with whom she falls in love, and she discovers sacred sex: a mixture of sex and love in which one gives up one’s soul for the loved one.  Thought provoking and a very nice story.

Aleph is written in the first person, and it is, at one level, an interesting story about a trip across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway.  At the allegorical level it is Paulo Coelho’s complex exploration of self discovery.

The train trip seems to involve the author himself: he reports on his interactions with his publishers, editors, journalists and readers in a very modest yet engaging way.  One sympathises with his hardships: lack of sleep, the cold and bad-tempered colleagues.  I found it easy to wish that I, too, were on that hellish train just for a chance to meet Paulo Coelho.

But the ‘meat’ of the story involves a perceived sin that Paulo committed in an earlier life: as an official in the Spanish Inquisition, he failed to testify to the innocence of several young women who were then burned alive.  One of the young women has been reincarnated as Hilal, a young Turkish woman who believes that her life depends on making contact with him.  Diligently, she tries to establish a relationship with him without really understanding her own motivation.  Paulo learns in a sequence of dreams what he did.  She forgives him unconditionally and unknowingly, and he finally declares his sin to her, and is able to persuade her to get on with her own life as a concert violinist.

The ‘Aleph’ is a condition where all things in the universe and all time are able to converge at one point.  It represents perfect enlightenment.  Paulo and Hilal are almost in an Aleph at a certain point between the carriages of the train.

Interestingly, there is no sex between Paulo and Hilal: not that he isn’t tempted and that she isn’t willing.  At one point, she appears naked to him and he remembers her naked before the Inquisition.  The only difference being that then she had pubic hair, but now she is shaved.  He comments negatively (and quite rightly, I think) on the popularity of women shaving.

This is quite an interesting novel.  The trip, the characters, their relationships, and the actual events are all captivating.  And Coelho’s writing style is both engaging and clear.  The problem for me with this book is that I don’t believe there is such a thing as an aleph, nor do I believe that, if there is such a thing as reincarnation, we carry a debt from one life to another.  It’s another example of my literal mind getting in the way!

Review: Bring Up the Bodies

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I have just finished reading Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel.  I felt that I had to read this Booker Prize-winning novel by a writer who has won the Booker Prize for the last two years.  I’m glad I did, because now I can see what all the fuss was about.  In my opinion, the novel is very good, but it also has its faults: see below.

The setting is sixteenth century England during the reign of Henry VIII, and the time frame is from the onset of illness of Katherine, the ex-queen and Henry’s divorced wife, to the execution of Anne Boleyn, the king’s second wife.  The story is told through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, Secretary to the king and the second most powerful influence in the kingdom.

What I liked about the novel was its (for me) faithful rendering of the culture and values of Tudor England.  The characters, though there are perhaps too many of them for one novel, are clearly drawn.  The prose is captivating, but sometimes a little difficult to follow.  And the story, itself, even if well-known, was difficult for me to set aside.

There are 762 reviews of Bring Up the Bodies on Amazon.com at the moment: 469 are five star and 26 are one star.  I thought it would be interesting to look at the one-star reviews and see to what extent I agree.

Here are excerpts from five of the one-star reviews:

  • “Non-specific pronoun use drove me batty… She begins lines with “He says….” He who? Why do I have to wonder who the speaker is?”
  • “If I had not been rather familiar with the Tudor history the author’s disjointed rambling would have lost me with the first ‘children falling out of the sky’ to the end.”
  • “Ms. Mantel’s offering is not completely factual and gives a very biased, gossipy, and amateurish impression of the people of the age.”
  • “She seems to be allergic to telling the reader who is speaking so you find yourself constantly going back through the pages to try and discover who is saying what.”
  • “Beautifully written, yes – try and follow the story! Yeesh! By the time the slew of adjectives are regurgitated (some call it prose) the story line (plot) is long forgotten. That’s okay at first but it occurs page after page after page and soon all one is reading is prose and about what?”

I have to admit that at first the use on the non-specific pronoun, ‘he’, confused me, as well.  But after about ten pages, I realized that ‘he’ almost invariably referred to Thomas Cromwell.

“Children falling out of the sky” occurs on the first page, and when I first read it, I wondered what the image was about.  But, by the bottom of the page, I realised that the ‘children’ were tamed hawks.  Still, I wondered why the author would begin a novel with a confusing statement.  An ambiguous statement – OK – but confusing?

Historical novels do not pretend to be ‘completely factual’, and it seems to me that it’s OK for an author to present a biased point of view, as long as the biased view ‘holds water’, which, in this case, in my opinion, it does.  It is gossipy: so what?  Amateurish?  I don’t think so.  I, too, have read a lot of Tudor history and I think Ms Mantel does an excellent job setting the reader down into the culture, values, and scenery of the sixteenth century.

What I found confusing was that Ms. Mantel would use different names for the same character: the ‘Duke of Norfolk’ could be ‘Thomas Howard’ on the next page.  I believe this is faithful to the customs of the 16th century: a man could be ‘Thomas’ to his friends, but ‘the Duke of Norfolk’ to strangers.  Still, with so many characters (68 are named in the Cast of Characters) it is difficult to recognize all of them in each instance.

The prose in Bring Up the Bodies borders, at times, on the poetic.  Take, for example this paragraph:

All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment, fur and feather flying; the beating off and whipping in of hounds, the coddling of tired horses, the nursing, by the gentlemen, of contusions, sprains and blisters.  And for a few days at least, the sun has shone on Henry.  Sometime before noon, clouds scudded in from the west and rain fell in big scented drops; but the sun re-emerged with scorching heat, and now the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.

In my opinion, Ms. Mantel sometimes gets carried away with her imaginative imagery, and risks losing some readers in doing so.  “Spy on what the saints are doing” is an example.  In a way this image is appropriate: the culture of the 16th century was fervent in its religious devotion and fear.  Moreover, the image reinforces the clarity of the sky.  But to the modern reader, the image is jolting: how can one look at the sky and spy on the saints, if, indeed, there are any saints?  If I had been clever enough to have this image spring to mind, I might have tempered it to say: “the sky is so clear one might think to see God’s halo.”

 In summary, I think that Bring Up the Bodies represents a landmark novel, and is worth the extra effort to read it with understanding.

Review: “The Deceit”

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I’ve been on holiday this week, so I have been a little negligent in keeping my blog current, but please rest assured that I will catch up.  While on holiday, I’ve been reading The Deceit.  I decided to buy Tom Knox’s thriller, The Deceit, because I wanted to see how another author writes a thriller, and because it is sited, at least in part, in Egypt, which is the main setting of my sixth novel.

The Deceit is a complex tale of the occult.  It begins with a prominent, old Egyptologist who is searching for the Sokar Hoard, a collection of ancient documents, which, rumour has it, will alter our concepts of religion.  Meanwhile, in Cornwall, England, there is someone practicing very sinister witchcraft, which involves the burning of dozens of live cats.  A detective inspector gets involved when a body is found – in mysterious circumstances – at the bottom of an abandoned tin mine.  The young protégée of the famous Egyptologist sets out to find the Sokar Hoard, on the basis of rumours that his mentor actually found the Hoard, but is now dead.  The young protégée is joined by a freelance movie maker and they discover part of the Hoard, but are – at first – unable to translate it.  Back in Cornwall, the detective inspector begins to home in on the practitioner of the deadly black magic.  The protégée, the movie maker and the detective inspector are threatened by various sinister forces, but they decipher the key message of the Hoard, and understand the nature of the black magic, respectively.  They also learn the connections between the message of the Hoard and the black magic.   If it were true, it would surely make your hair stand on end!

There are many twists and turns in this story.  Some of the twists seem more like diversionary devices, than essential elements  The characters seem two-dimensional; their purpose is mainly to facilitate the story.  The language is story-telling language; it does not aspire to literature.

What contributes substantially to its believability is the author’s compelling knowledge of ancient Egypt.  The places, the ancient culture and beliefs are all very real, and form the platform from which the occult tale can be launched.  Unfortunately for me, it’s a leap too far.  Too much of my religious understanding and my knowledge of science is called into question, but for those who do not suffer from credibility blockages, this novel may be just your cup of tea.

Childrens’ Books

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Last week, I found myself in a position where I was reviewing a child’s book.  I had signed up with the Readers’ Favorite website to a contest.  I sent a book in to be reviewed, and one of the conditions was that I would review someone else’s book.  I could choose which book I wanted to review, and Readers’ Favorite would send the book to me (as long as I lived in the States).  I thought I would select a book, and buy it on amazon.co.uk.  When I began to search for a book on the Readers’ Favorite site, they all seemed to be ebooks.  I finally noticed a button labelled ‘Find a Hard Copy Book’.  I clicked in that button an one (1) book appeared on my screen: it was a childrens’ book.  When I queried the website whether there really was only one hard copy book available, I was told that for the time being, that was the case, because they were prioritising books which had been entered in the contest.

When I read, I much prefer to be holding a hard copy book, rather than a screen, so I thought, what the heck, I’ll review the children’s book.  I bought it on amazon.co.uk; it arrived, and I read it twice.  I can’t tell you the title of the book or the author’s name because Readers’ Favorite has a (quite sensible) rule that only they can post reviews on the internet.  (What follows could be considered a review.)

The book was about a baby animal which is born in winter and is brought into the family house and raised until it is old enough to join other animals of the same kind.  The story featured some of the pranks the animal got up to, as well as what its human carers learned in the process.  It was a cute story, and the author and publisher had obviously gone to a good deal of trouble to produce the book: it was hard cover with lots of colour illustrations.  The back cover had the author’s photo and bio.  There were also comments by local people about the story.  There were several informative pages at the back of the book where one could learn more about this particular animal. All well and good.

But . . . I felt that the story was told from the perspective of the animal’s carer (the author), rather than the perspective of a child.  In this sense, there was too much detail about things that were of concern to the carer, but which would be of little interest to most children.  There were missed opportunities to explore the feelings of the carer and to guess at the feelings of the animal in particular situations.  Many children find stories which provoke or include feelings quite interesting.

The illustrations were in colour, placed adjacent to the relevant text, and quite appropriate.  But for me, they were complete pictures, leaving no room for a child to add to the image from his imagination.  I believe that the most effective illustrations in childrens’ books are either fanciful or are incomplete in some way, thus provoking the child’s imagination.

So, for me, this particular child’s book should get a good score for effort, but it missed one important point: catering to the reader.  Of course all writers have to keep the reader in mind as they write, and this must be more of a challenge when an adult writes for children.

Writers without a Genre

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Iain Banks, a Scottish “novelist of hallucinatory brilliance who attracted notoriety with his grotesque and bizarre tales” died last week at the age of 59.  His obituary in The Daily Telegraph says that until his first book, The Wasp Factory, appeared, he “plastered the walls of his room with rejection slips”.  I know the feeling!  The Wasp Factory was a controversial first novel which brought Banks notoriety (1984).  “Even before its appearance, one publisher claimed that the book had made him vomit into his waste paper basket.  It had a similarly emetic effect on many reviewers: ‘a repulsive piece of work’; ‘silly, gloatingly sadistic’; ‘a work of unparalleled depravity’ were among the judgements of the newspapers.  Many, though, also conceded the hallucinatory brilliance of the author’s imagination, and there was widespread acknowledgement that Banks’ control of tone and language were more assured than that of many established novelists.”

“The defining qualities of Banks’ novels, whether mainstream or genre, remained a macabre black humour and a taste for the bizarre and the Gothic. . . . In 1987 he published Consider Phlebas, the first of the Culture novels; thereafter there was, for a time at least, a clearer distinction between his science fiction output and his more conventional novels, which tended to appear in alternative years.  His space operas, which combined political musings, scientific speculation, mordantly funny asides (the names of the artificially intelligent spaceships were a long-running joke), and violent, frequently gruesome action sequences, brought him a new, large and enthusiastic fan base.”

My reaction is that Banks was one of those rare novelists who had two distinct audiences: a mainstream audience and a science fiction audience, although it has to be said that some of his works had their feet planted in both camps.  One recent commentator expressed the view that “not since Robert Louis Stevenson, has a writer so successfully bridged multiple genres”.  As a child, I was a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson; I liked Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and I thought of him as a clever novelist.  I decided to look him up, and I found that he, too, was a Scot.  His Wikipedia listing has him as a “novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer.”  In fact, Stevenson wrote twelve published novels, five collections of short stories, six uncollected short stories, five volumes of poetry, seven volumes of travel writing, and a long list of essays and other works.  In addition to all that, Stevenson ” wrote over 123 original musical compositions or arrangements, including solos, duets, trios and quartets for various combinations of flageolet, flute, clarinet, violin, guitar, mandolin, and piano.”

Unfortunately, he died at the age of 44, probably of a stroke, having suffered from poor health for much of his life.  With the rise of ‘modern literature’ after World War I, Stevenson was seen as a second class writer, specialising in children’s literature and the horror genre.  The 1973 edition of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature (2000 pages) does not even mention Stevenson.  But later in the 20th century, his reputation began to re-ascend with recognition of his literary skill and imaginative powers.  Setting the critics aside, he is the 26th most translated author in the world.

So, sometimes specialisation is not necessary.

Happy Endings

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My wife and I had some good friends over for dinner on Saturday.  They asked me to tell them about my latest novel Sable Shadow and The Presence – as yet unpublished.  I ran through a synopsis of the novel and explained the key messages.  They listened attentively, and when I finished, Barbara said, “I’m glad it has a happy ending.”

I said, “Well, it’s not exactly a happy ending, but it did turn out a lot better than the key character might have expected.

“Barbara said, “It seems to be the fashion in fiction these days that every novel has to end in tragedy or at least in a down beat conclusion.”

I don’t know whether it’s true that fiction is in a depressed mode nowadays, but I know I couldn’t write a novel that ended badly for the characters.  In the first place, literature is supposed to be thought-provoking and entertaining.  For me, tragedies are not entertaining, and the only thoughts tragedies provoke are gloom and doom.  So, I don’t do outright tragedy. Yes, bad things happen to some of the characters (sometimes as a result of their own doing), but I give them the chance to make at least a partial recovery.  I think the average reader is more interested in the how and why of the recovery than s/he is in the tragedy itself.  We all know that tragedies happen; what we’d like to know is how people recover from them.  My view on writing about tragedy is probably influenced by my attitude toward life.  I’ve had my share of hard knocks, but I’ve managed (with God’s help) to get past the knocks, and I think that most people can do the same.  For example, a friend of mine referred me to a YouTube video of a man who lost a leg in a motorcycle accident.  He had been a very keen golfer.  Now, he’s back playing what looks like very good golf standing on only one leg.  It’s amazing that he can keep his balance while swinging his driver on one leg!

If I look back over my novels, Fishing in Foreign Seas could have ended very badly for Jamie, who is the lead character.  He could have lost his wife and his job.  He did lose the big order which he thought would make of break his career, but his wife forgave him, and his career was actually boosted by his efforts to win the order.

In Sin & Contrition, none of the six characters had their lives unfold as they had hoped and expected.  But, when I interviewed each of them at the end, they all felt – to varying degrees – that the good aspects of their lives outweighed the bad.

Efraim’s Eye ended rather badly for Efraim, the terrorist, but, so far, no readers have really lamented this.  Paul thought he would lose Sarah, the woman he intended to marry, but when he gave up Naomi, he was able to get Sarah back.  Naomi gave up Paul and her job, but she got the kind of life she really wanted in Israel.

In The Iranian Scorpion, Robert was condemned to die by hanging is a prison in eastern Iran, but at the end we find him planning a trip to Dubai with his girlfriend.

I suppose I am what you might call an incorrigible optimist.