Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz ***

Like Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Cahokia Jazz is a murder mystery that takes place in an alternative version of the United States. Cahokia was a real-life Native American city, located across the river from present-day St Louis. In the story, Native Americans were not decimated by smallpox and retain power in Cahokia in 1922.

The book starts strong with an atmospheric crime scene and all the noir elements in place: night, fog, a violent murder, detectives in fedoras, untrustworthy witnesses, hints of powerful subterranean social forces at work. It's not long before the murder becomes secondary to the public reaction and inflamed racial tensions. Which is fine, except that the portrait of city politics is rather too superficial. For example, overt conflict breaks out between the Klan and the native population, with the city's third ethnic group receiving barely a mention. I also felt that the characters were underdeveloped. 

The murder plot was fine. But I didn't get a sense of Cahokia as a living, breathing city, nor an idea of how the United States would be different if we had a substantial native population during westward expansion.

Ruth Garrett Millikan, Varieties of Meaning ** 1/2

Varieties of Meaning is a work of academic philosophy. The title and the back-cover abstract led me to believe it would explore the common thread that connects all the different things we say have meaning: "people mean to do various things, tools and other artifacts are meant for various things; people mean various things by using words and sentences; natural signs mean things ... What does meaning in the sense of purpose have to do with meaning in the sense of representing or signifying?" I've been pondering the meaning of "meaning" since my undergraduate days, and hoped for new insights.

But Millikan's topic is different. She uses evolutionary psychology to explore the nature of our internal representations (aka concepts), how they differ from those of non-human animals, and how we might have developed them. She concludes that concepts are more directly goal-oriented than is generally assumed, and that they are not constructed from intermediate sense impressions.

This topic is interesting even if it's not what I was looking for. However, Millikan falls into the common academic trap of focusing too much on esoteric terminological disputes at the expense of clear exposition, not to mention the evolutionary psychology vice of "just so stories."

There were a few asides that intrigued me. One was a (probably false) anecdote about how venomous snakes hunt and eat mice without the benefit of a concept of "mouse":

The story is that certain venomous snakes perceive mice for purposes of striking by sight, trace the path of the dying mouse by small, and find its head so as to swallow that part first by feel, and that none of those jobs can be accomplished using any other sensory modality. A snake that was wired up this way would merely perceive first a "strike me," then a "chase me," and finally a "swallow me," having no grasp at all that what it struck, followed, and swallowed was the same thing.

Another was the distinction, attributed to Gilbert Ryle, between "task verbs" that describe an attempt to do something (hunt, look, listen) and "achievement verbs" that indicate success (find, see, hear).

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Third Realm ***

The Third Realm is the third book in Knausgaard's The Morning Star series. It is quite similar to the first book, with multiple narrators recounting events just before and after the emergence of the new star. Several sections retell incidents from the first book from a different point of view; for example, we hear from Tove and Gaute who are married to Arne and Kathrine from The Morning Star.

The hallmark of Knausgaard's style is the slow emergence of themes from a wealth of mundane detail. The prominent themes that arise in The Third Realm are questions about the source of evil and the differences between external appearance and internal truth.

Like The Morning Star, The Third Realm ends with a cliffhanger. The star disappears, and the surviving member of the murdered black metal band tells Tove that her task will be revealed to her. I am far enough into the series to know not to expect a resolution any time soon.

The fourth book, The School of Night, recently became available in English. Early reviews tell me it has a single narrator, a peripheral character from the first three books, and is a modern version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. At the moment, I plan to skip it and possibly the rest of the series. I'm starting to suspect that Knausgaard doesn't have a vision for how it all fits together.

Michael Wejchert, Hidden Mountains ** 1/2

Hidden Mountains is the true story of two couples who attempt an unnamed and unclimbed peak in the titular mountain range in Alaska. The couples were serious climbers of the weekend warrior variety; an Alaskan expedition was perhaps beyond their skill level, due to logistics rather than the technical climbing difficulty. One of the men ends up critically injured in a fall, requiring rescue by an elite mountain rescue unit.

The book has all the elements necessary for an exciting and compelling mountaineering tale, but from the start something annoyed me.  Was it the sketchiness of the mountaineering history that the author provides? No. Was it the judgmental tone that crept in when he discussed sport climbing? No. The portrait of legendary climber David Roberts that contradicted everything I knew about him from his books? Well, yes, that did irritate me and make me question the author's credibility.

Eventually I realized that the issue was a lack of relevance and perspective. The idea that sport climbing and improved communication technologies have led to riskier ventures is interesting, but what does it have to do with the story at hand? And should we lament the change or celebrate it?

The book also has organizational issues. As a professional writer myself, I know that you need to keep the reader focused on the task at hand. If you've got interesting background details or tangents, they need to come before or after the main story. For example, the full resume of the helicopter pilot should not intrude on the drama of Emmett's rescue. 

The chapter about the helicopter pickup becomes positively Inception-like in its nested stories: the pilot performed a similar rescue many years before; the climbers in that earlier rescue had completed many important ascents and recently contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome; those climbers left their satellite phone at base camp and eventually called a district ranger at Denali National Park; that ranger was a Vietnam vet who was a "legend in Alaska rescue circles"; he flew a Pave Hawk helicopter whose rotors move at a constant speed of 258 RPM.  Every story here is dramatic and informative, but they interfere with each other, and the reader has to exert a lot of mental energy keeping them straight.

The book's subtitle is "Survival and Reckoning After a Climb Gone Wrong," and indeed its most emotional chapter is about the impact on the fallen climber and his fiancée. The most memorable parts, however, are about the modern systems of mountain rescue. There is one brief scene in which the author himself completes a tricky pitch on an Alaskan peak and receives a text from his girlfriend asking where to find the toner cartridges for their printer. 

Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships *****

The Long Ships is a Swedish adventure novel telling the saga of Red Orm Tostesson, a widely-traveled and notably lucky Viking in the years around the first millennium. Like The Island of Second Sight, it's a classic of world literature I'd never heard of before pulling it from the bookstore shelf. 

From the Introduction to the NYRB edition, written by Michael Chabon:

In my career as a reader I have encountered only three people who knew The Long Ships, and all of them, like me, loved it immoderately. Four for four: from this tiny but irrefutable sample I dare to extrapolate that this novel, first published in Sweden during the Second World War, stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth.

Like traditional adventure novels, The Long Ships eschews psychological realism in favor of unadorned action. It is largely episodic but soon reveals a recurring theme about the role of religion in that world. On his first long voyage, Orm, raised with the old Norse gods, spends time captive in Moorish Spain, escapes to Christian Ireland, and comes home to find the King of Denmark converted to Christianity. Many of Orm's adventures, and even more of his moral reasoning, involve weighing the impact of each religion on the "luck" of the protagonists. They decide, for instance, that they should sacrifice a goat at the launching of a ship, because the sea gods are more powerful in this instance than Christ; on the other hand, they spare their injured enemies.

The joy of the book comes from the adventure and the dryly humorous way the story is told.

The year (1000) ended without the smallest sign having appeared in the sky, and there ensued a period of calm in the border country. Relations with the Smalanders continued to be peaceful, and there were no local incidents worth mentioning, apart from the usual murders at feasts and weddings, and a few men burned in their houses as a result of neighborly disputes.

Orm has a wise-cracking friend named Toke who is a particularly rich source of bon mots. 

The Long Ships is an entertaining way of learning about the state of Europe in the 10th century, with plenty of battles and violence when our heroes go a-viking.