Patrick O'Brian, The Wine-Dark Sea ****

No creative sea battles in this one, but several prizes, a volcano, icebergs, and a high-altitude trip across the Andes. (The title refers to the strange conditions that preceded the volcano.) The early chapters include an interesting extended treatment of equality versus hierarchy. An enjoyable entry in the series.

Tom McCarthy, Typewriters Bombs Jellyfish ***

Tom McCarthy's first novel, Remainder, is one of my all-time favorites. Nothing else he has written comes close to it. The essay collection Typewriters Bombs Jellyfish is my first look at his non-fiction work.

Taken together, the essays form a full-throated defense of high modernism, of the sort epitomized by Ulysses and attempted by McCarthy in his novel C. He argues that these works reflect reality better than "middlebrow fiction" with its conventions of naturalism and authenticity. "The twentieth-century avant-garde often paints a far more realistic picture of experience than nineteenth-century realists ever did." I can see many of the obsessions that underlay Remainder.

McCarthy makes his points clearly and effectively. Unfortunately, though, those points tend to reiterate fairly standard critical insights about the constructive nature of all reality. McCarthy's main subjects are the canon of modernism and pre-modernism (Joyce, Robbe-Grillet, Proust, Tristram Shandy), and his arguments summarize the giants of critical theory (Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes). The essays about other art forms (Gerhard Richter, David Lynch) apply the same principles.

The only time I felt like McCarthy enhanced my appreciation was his two discussions of Zinedine Zidane. In addition to an alluring description of the 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, he cites the French writer Jean-Phillipe Toussaint talking about the infamous head butt:

Like everyone else in the ground, the author missed the incident itself (it took place off the ball), but saw it on the replay screen: always-already mediated, even for those present.  ... Zidane, who had announced prior to the game that it would be his last ever, wanted...to stop the ninety minutes running their full course, to short-circuit finitude itself.

Susie Steiner, Persons Unknown ***

Persons Unknown is the follow-up to Missing, Presumed, featuring most of the same characters (excluding the wrongdoers, of course). It leans more heavily on the domestic drama than Missing, Presumed did: in this one, Manon is pregnant and largely on the sidelines of the case. The frankness with which the characters reveal their insecurities is the most distinctive aspect of both books.

The murder victim is Manon's sister's ex-husband, which doesn't really fit with the rest of his background story but is necessary so that the plot can make Manon's adopted son the prime suspect. As in Missing, Presumed, the most interesting character is a tangential one: in Missing, Presumed it was the missing girl's mother; in Persons Unknown it's the shopkeeper who shelters the girl at the center of the mystery.

And boy, they sure seem to have CCTV cameras everywhere in Britain!

Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed ***

Missing, Presumed is a solid but generic police procedural in which Cambridgeshire policewoman Manon Bradshaw searches for a missing woman while also dealing with personal feelings of loneliness. Steiner adds a dollop of ambition to the book by having many of its characters dealing with perceived missing elements in their lives, giving the title a double meaning.

Several characters take turns as the point-of-view character. Authors typically use this device to add tension because each character knows different things or to offer distinctive voices, but neither of these tricks happen here.

I received Missing, Presumed for Christmas along with its follow-up Persons Unknown. More Manon on the horizon!

John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat ****

It might seem odd that I bought this book about "Japan in the Wake of World War II" from the bookshop at Pearl Harbor, but it was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner sitting alongside what seemed like mostly jingoistic tourist bait. I'm also interested in the subject of forming new societies after violent overthrows, such as in Ten Days that Shook the World and Red Star Over China.

Embracing Defeat covers the American occupation of Japan from August 1945 to April 1952, mostly from the Japanese point of view. It is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, with major sections about Japanese popular culture, the promulgation of its new constitution, and the Tokyo war crimes trials. Dower is able to show how the Japanese felt about the major events and to provide clear analysis, so I felt like I got a good sense for the time and place even though I wasn't familiar with most of the incidents he described.

The main message I will remember is that many consequences of the occupation flowed from General MacArthur's single decision to retain the emperor. That decision dictated the shape of the constitution, who got tried as war criminals, and how far the Americans allowed indigenous social movements to go. In the latter half of the occupation, Cold War considerations started to take precedence.

The book didn't cover economic issues very thoroughly because Dower has apparently covered this subject elsewhere.