NOTHING ON EARTH, spy thriller for the Rachel Cusk reader

NOTHING ON EARTH
IAN MacKENZIE
The Unnamed Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "I often traveled for work." So begins Nothing On Earth, a propulsive novel that tells the story of Anna Hendrix, an American spy, as she seeks answers for the appearance of a mysterious and potentially powerful metal of unknown origin.

For a long time, Anna was in counterterrorism, but now she is on a new mission, one which has friends and enemies across the globe scrambling to find answers. Her pursuit will take her from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia—through expatriate enclaves and the NGO communities in which she cultivates her cover and extracts information from a wide cast of characters: aid workers, diplomats, foreign correspondents, energy magnates, insurgents, dissident, and of course, other spies.

As the pressure mounts to find the original source of the metal, Anna must make choices with life-changing implications not just for herself, but for the people with whom she deals, always bearing in mind the young daughter waiting for her back home. In Nothing on Earth, novelist Ian MacKenzie reimagines a pivotal decade in the Pax Americana, from the killing of Osama bin Laden to the storming of the Capitol. Anna’s voice—lean, understated, unflappable—is our companion and guide through the dark topography of geopolitical power, and in the end, the furthest reaches of human comprehension.

For fans of Rachel Cusk and John Le Carré alike, this is a story of power and secrecy, geopolitics and science, parenthood and loss, and the question of how we know what we think we know, how we make sense of our existence on Earth.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The macguffin in this story is a metal called for convenience "The Resource." It's never precisely named, but it has sci-fi-esque qualities that make it very important to the US and our new global competitor China. It also drags Anna Hendrix from pillar to post in a grail quest set at the end of the American imperial project.

The reading experience is the thing that peopelled me through the story, as Anna faces obstacles and overcomes opponents whose parallel grail quests for The Resource she thwarts and redirects and generally uses her personal charm and concomitant network of allies and enablers, and the occasional useful idiot, to shape events.

Events that are shaped are rife with consequences. Empires have ill-defined goals that form entire futures for people with no stake in the success of those imperial goals except surviving their aftermath. Anna Hendrix, unlike spies I'm accustomed to spending time with *cough*Bond*cough*, in delivering the story directly to us, allows her audience access to her ruminations on the enterprise she's embarked on, though always couched in interpersonal terms.

That makes her sound like a women's-fiction manipulative heroine. She's not that...she is but she isn't...Anna Hendrix, in Author Ian's hands, is a subtle character whose narration has layers of awareness and intentionality that are worthy of the publisher's comparison of the story to one by Rachel Cusk. As in Author Cusk's fiction, I found Anna Hendrix to be a self-aware narrator of her story, while remaining within that story. It's a tricky narrative effect to pull off. It requires sophisticated, self-aware use of tropes and conventions. (I'd cite examples were I writing a critique or analysis for scholarly purposes but I ain't got them chops.)

Setting the story amid the massive upheavals of the Teens and early Twenties allows Author Ian to, from the safe distance of Anna's story-role of first-person narrator, comment on the nature and responsibility of espionage. What result justifies the costs (there are always costs) of meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations, and more importantly the quotidian workings of people's lives? What happens to goals when those setting them change those goals? What is Anna Hendrix's responsibility as the world shifts in directions she can't predict?

That undersells the action part of the storytelling. I'm as susceptible to a chase scene as any other guy. I like Anna Hendrix telling me about how she rips and runs and fights off physical threats, because it's not mechanical...Anna's a mother, her stake in the world is as a result much deeper than her male counterparts in fiction. If she's fighting for her life, she's fighting for her motherhood at the same time.

Sexist though it may be to acknowledge it, mothers are fundamentally different from fathers in affect and effect. I'm not really interested in going deeply into that argument in reviewing this story but I feel it's important to say that the issue of Anna Hendrix As Mother is not glossed over, nor is it obsessed over; another fine balancing act Author Ian navigates with more aplomb than I'd expect from a man writing from a woman's PoV. So now let's talk about that.

I can't offer a full fifth star to this story because Author Ian, as a man, is projecting some cultural baggage of motherhood onto Anna Hendrix and her choice of a career that takes her away from her child. I regard that fact as an unfairness on my part, but I have to do it in the name of reporting my own honest reaction to an important fact of the story. Anna's just given birth as the story opens. I'm aware of that fact for the first quarter of our current action but then, as in life, my awareness of it drops away. I don't know this for a fact, obviously, but I...not a member of the Cult of Mother...found Author Ian's periodic refreshing of her motherhood both appropriate and awkward, as though the Author-Man thought "waitaminnit what about the kid?" I could easily be talked out of that perception by a woman taking issue with my statement. I was also unclear as to why Anna's relationship with her daughter Thea's Korean father was not more part of her calculations regarding The Resource and her pursuit of it.

Another writer would've leaned on The Resource's ill-defined otherworldliness, very much to the detriment of Anna Hendrix's story of how she sets about controlling events surrounding this Resource. I mention this to reassure those who experience story-hives at the lightest contact with things SFnal that you're not asked to invest more than passing interest in the nature of The Resource.

I'll say that as spy thrillers go I couldn't think of another one that so deftly combines the quest elements with the depth of a more interpersonal literary novel. It was a story praised by multiple very high-quality writers, and deservedly so. It's well worth your time and treasure to acquire, literary consumers, and yours too, spy-story folk.

ZONE ROUGE, a novel fictionalizing a reality most of us haven't realized exists

ZONE ROUGE
MICHAEL JEROME PLUNKETT
The Unnamed Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: We are démineurs. We dismantle bombs.

Ferrand Martin and his team of démineurs spend their days in the ruined fields of Zone Rouge on the periphery of Verdun, France where they clean up the artillery and explosives used in World War I. One bullet, one bit of shrapnel, one bomb at a time. The work, they say, is not measured in days, months, or years, but in generations. It’s taken a century to get this far, and it will take many more centuries to complete.

One morning, a routine call to pick up a half-buried artillery shell turns out to be much more than just a single they discover a human skeleton, fully intact. Ferrand and his fellow démineurs dig deep into poisoned soil to reveal the past is rarely ever distant from the present.

This startling discovery kicks off a series of events that sees the usually desolate Zone Rouge teem with activity as academics, politicians, and locals all wrangle over the legacy of the War and what it means to remember. Zone Rouge is a brilliant reimagining of the Sisyphus myth suffused with our modern anxieties over war, climate, class, and the ghosts of our pasts.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The real Red Zone, northeastern France, is still...107 years after the Armistice on 11/11/18...unavailable for human habitation, so damaged by and so dangerous from munitions and chemicals used during the battles of the day that it is still polluting the soil, the air, the water...there are areas where arsenic makes up 18% of the soil by weight in the 21st century.

The devastation has led to the abandonment of the area as a productive landscape. The démineurs ...this is a real job, there are hundreds of these men working the "Iron Harvest" from both the 20th century's great wars...have greater risks for some cancers, greater risk, obviously, of fatal accidents as is expected for those working with unexploded ordnance.

An expansion of the myth of Sisyphus, a kind of riposte to the great classic All Quiet on the Western Front, the idea of the story is the unending price paid for war. As long as most of us have never heard of le Zone Rouge, which..be honest...you hadn't before now, the consequences of stupid people wielding too much power are kept out of sight-out of mind. So reading the quotidian struggles of those who, for the sake of a job, clean up their grandparents' and great-grands' messes. To their own occasionally lethal detriment.

No matter the side, no matter the divide, no matter the outcome, the planet we depend on for our existence and are highly unlikely to stop needing for that suffers fro our greed and fecklessness. In the end we will pay for our actions, are beginning to pay for our actions even now. The author is (per his Goodreads bio) a former member of the "...Marine Corps and is a former EMT. He is the Co-founder and Executive Director of the Literature of War Foundation and host of The LitWar Podcast. His writing has appeared in Wrath-Bearing Tree, The War Horse, Leatherneck Magazine, and other publications." With that CV, one can see why this is the subject he chose for his debut novel. A laser focus on the tangible costs of war has clearly guided the gentleman's course in adulthood. The reason the book is easy to read is in his ability to see the men, the actual uniform-wearing people, in the story. It gives the story its immediacy. The weakest part of this narrative is the man who runs a town in the Zone Rouge, who dreams of rebuilding it (in his own image of it, of course) in spite of hurdles both practical...aresenic-poisoned soil and unexploded ordnance do not say "bring the family to live here!"...and bureaucratic. The French government does not want the terrible optics of dead kids who played with a mine to go viral, nor does the rewilding of the areas most impacted strike them as a bad thing. Pripyat, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, is undergoing this process as well, and it's definitely having an impact on the natural world that the disaster seemed to preclude. We as a species need to learn from these terrible events, learn how best to fix the carnage we've wrought on the planet's other inhabitants. The reason Hugo, the "mayor," doesn't come off well is he is an archetype of end-stage capitalism's obscene valorization of greed, selfishness, and self-interest.

As I suspect that was the author's intent, I take no exception to Hugo's horribleness. I take mild exception to Ferrand, our main character's, Boy-Scouty, libertarian ways. That's a fast way to enable fascism's rise, as we're seeing now...so no, no fifth star on this story.

That does not mean I was not very pleased to read this book. I was engaged throughout, I was educated by the story's reason for existing...I'm one who hadn't clocked the existence of the titular zone...and I thoroughly appreciated the author's deftness at refining and re-presenting Sisyphus for this climate-changing, cleaning-up century.