It would be easy to assume that M.T. Anderson was paying homage to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in his comic novel, NICKED (Pantheon, 240 pp., $28). But this uproarious saga was actually inspired by a real expedition that sailed from the Italian port of Bari in 1087, intent on stealing the remains of St. Nicholas, which had lain in an Anatolian crypt for 700 years, attracting an enticing stream of well-endowed pilgrims.
Drawing on contemporary accounts, fantastical folk tales and his own knack for high jinks, Anderson populates his version of the tale with a cast of sleazy relic hunters, brutish Norman mercenaries, snobbish Venetians and alms-hungry clerics — as well as the requisite holy fool, a monk named Nicephorus, possessed of “an irritatingly pure and generous heart” and incapable of telling a lie.
There’s a battle at sea that’s not what it appears to be and some chaotic combat on shore that has Nicephorus and the chief saint hunter taking shelter in a lascivious nunnery. Even St. Nicholas, whose corpse oozes a healing “sacred slime,” turns out to be not quite as advertised. If only Nicephorus hadn’t fallen asleep during a communal prayer vigil, emerging with a personal calling that’s interpreted by his abbot as a grandiose divine mission. “What,” Nicephorus asks plaintively, “ if my dream was simply a dream?”
The nightmare of war is what haunts Howard Norman’s COME TO THE WINDOW (Norton, 240 pp., $27.99), which opens in the spring of 1918 with an apparently inexplicable murder in a Nova Scotian fishing village. On her wedding night, 24-year-old Elizabeth Frame shoots her husband with his own revolver, then descends from their bedroom and stuffs the weapon into the blowhole of a whale that’s been stranded on the beach. Hauled before a magistrate, this unlikely killer is also revealed to be a bigamist — and pregnant.
Trying to make sense of all this is the novel’s narrator, a genial if somewhat obsessive journalist from Halifax named Tobias Havenshaw, whose own happy marriage was interrupted by his wife’s service as a battlefield surgeon. Amelia has only recently returned from the slaughter in Europe, where she was surrounded, as she puts it, by “thousands of murders.” Now tasked with combating “the merciless plague of influenza” in Canada, she becomes more involved with her husband’s reporting after Elizabeth Frame goes on the lam with the court stenographer, a war veteran whose comrades at Passchendaele accompany him in the form of the pocket diaries he retrieved from their mangled corpses. In Amelia’s view, tolerance is the key to understanding this new world they inhabit: “We’re all being driven mad by war and the Spanish flu.”
Eighty-year-old Mieke Reborn is well-acquainted with inherited trauma, as is her grandson, Will, whose time with her in present-day New Jersey is interspersed with an account of Mieke’s World War II-era childhood in Kristopher Jansma’s OUR NARROW HIDING PLACES (Ecco, 272 pp., $30). At the close of the novel, Jansma reveals that his own grandmother barely endured what has come to be known as the Hunger Winter of 1944-45, when famine devastated the Netherlands as the Germans clung desperately to power.
This perhaps explains the searing intimacy of Jansma’s wartime chapters, which document the shifts in Mieke’s family life from mildly interrupted routine to desperate struggle for survival. As the fighting escalates, the roar of V2 rockets can be heard from the shoreline half a mile away. In the town, after everything from kitchen pots to drawer knobs has been confiscated, the few remaining men go into hiding to escape a forced labor detail, leaving the women to feed entire households with a few turnips and the children to engage in full-time scavenging. Inevitably, Mieke becomes well-versed in the “coded cleverness” of those who resist the occupiers, “all these small, secret ways to tell if someone can be trusted.”
Trust is a rare commodity in Joseph Kanon’s historical thriller SHANGHAI (Scribner, 304 pp., $28), which unfurls in such a classic noir style you expect Humphrey Bogart to turn up in one of its gangster-infested casinos. It’s 1939, and, thanks to the intervention of his long-estranged uncle, Daniel Lohr has escaped Berlin before he, unlike so many in the anti-Nazi underground, can be been rounded up and tortured.
On one of the last ships to leave Trieste for China, Daniel encounters a beautiful Viennese, with whom he has “not a romance, an escape.” But there’s no escaping the complex dangers of Shanghai, nominally controlled by the Chinese but increasingly dominated by the advancing Japanese. Ricocheting between the deeply compromised newspaper editor for whom he works in the evening and the deeply shady uncle whose nightclub business he’s learning by day, Daniel must distinguish between “lines he wouldn’t cross, lines that could be stretched, lines he couldn’t see.” Who’s responsible for the most recent spurt of violence? One of the rival Chinese gang leaders? The arrogant local agent of the Kempeitai, Japan’s version of the Gestapo? No wonder Daniel’s newspaper boss writes off the whole scene as “very Dodge City.”
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