Becky Ohlsen

Describing Jedediah Berry’s debut novel is no simple task. Any halfway accurate comparison requires mixing and matching things that don’t really go together, like “Columbo” and The City of Lost Children, or Alice in Wonderland and one of Kafka’s sinister office buildings. The Manual of Detection is a detective story, obviously, but the detectives in it don’t actually solve crimes, and the main character, Charles Unwin, isn’t a detective at all. In short, take everything you think you know about classic pulp-noir detective fiction, turn it sideways and look at it through a hall of mirrors—that’s pretty close.

Unwin is a lowly clerk who loves and excels at his job and is deeply annoyed to wake up one day and find himself promoted. Each clerk at the Agency, where he works, is assigned to file the case reports of a particular detective, and Unwin’s detective, the superstar Travis T. Sivart, has vanished. If he wants his old job back, Unwin has to find Sivart.

So far, not so weird. But consider that it’s been raining steadily for weeks, all the alarm clocks in the city are missing, everyone’s sleepwalking, and the guy who promoted Unwin is now a corpse under the desk. Also, the main surveillance technique at the Agency seems to be spying on people’s dreams.

The heart of Berry’s story is the fragile balance between order and chaos. Unwin is a devoted champion of the former, while the book’s primary villain, Hoffman, wants to turn the city into a 24-hour carnival. 

The world in which all of this plays out is a sort of retro steampunk, noir-ish take on classic Sam Spade territory: people use phonographs and manual typewriters; the detectives judge each other by the suaveness of their hats; two of the villain’s henchmen drive a truck that is essentially a huge boiler room on wheels. Femme fatales await Unwin around every corner, some helpful, some deadly, most of them somewhere in between. All this rich texture, delivered with deadpan style and combined with the twisty story’s fast pace, makes for an immensely satisfying read.

Reviewer Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. Jedediah Berry, author of The Manual of Detection, is also the science fiction reviewer for BookPage.

A post-apocalyptic fable with unexpected overtones of optimism and patriotism, the latest novel from innovative English writer Jim Crace comes across a bit like Road Warrior meets Grapes of Wrath. Only prettier. The Pesthouse is set in a future America remote enough that technology has faded into history and become superfluous. As a result, the story has a sense of timelessness it could just as easily be set hundreds of years ago, rather than in an era in which coins, books and the decomposing husks of giant metal machines amaze and baffle those who encounter them even as they're treasured as artifacts.

The story follows two young people, the awkward and gangly but good-hearted Jackson and the fiery-haired innocent Margaret, on a journey toward the coast where, they believe, ships will take them away from their own benighted land and into a more promising future. The title of the book refers to the wilderness hut where Jackson and Margaret meet. She's been stashed away there for exhibiting the flu-like symptoms of the flux, a plague that periodically decimates the population of her village. He seeks shelter there one night while waiting for his injured knee to heal so he can rejoin his brother on their journey. Neither trajectory goes as expected; Margaret recovers, and Jackson winds up traveling with her instead of his brother. By the end of the story, both protagonists have realized that good sense demands they leave behind what Crace calls the taints and perils of America but their hearts, and circumstances, dictate otherwise.

At one point, stranded at a port with several other emigrants and unable to leave as planned, someone comments that they're all Americans now, and it's said with the resigned acceptance of a curse. But ultimately, Jackson and Margaret don't see it that way. Despite the criticisms inherent in a story set in an America that has driven itself to ruin, The Pesthouse ends up as a strangely patriotic novel particularly if patriotism can be defined as loving a land and the idea of a country even when that idea clashes with reality.

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.