The Fourth Assassin was a disappointment. It was claustrophobic and depressing without offering anything of real interest. The characters were clusters of stereotypes and flipped from being philosophical to childish. It does the Israeli/Palestinian conflict no justice and deepens the idea that Palestinians are fanatical killers and unreasonable idiots. It presents American society (this takes place in New York during a UN conference) as naive and without troubles, incapable of relating to or understanding others. (This kind of goes with the attitude in The Last Good Man that safe and secure societies have no problems and the people in them never suffer.) The main character was a little interesting, being tired of violence and reactionary blame of others for all problems. He's more interested in caring for his family than trying to convince others of the impossible. The Palestinian police chief was even more intriguing and I found myself wishing occasionally that the book was focused on him. Overall, an outsider's description of a fraught situation brings nothing new to the picture. He basically avoids the common temptation of ascribing all culpability to one side or the other so I'll give him credit for that.
Bombay Ice was a massive, complex, sprawling read. A first novel, it was monumentally pretentious and yet I enjoyed it despite it's many faults. Not everybody will. Some people will find the constant weaving of references to The Tempest into the narrative to be a little too cute and irritating. It also takes time and patience to get through and if you find the pretentiousness annoying, it won't be a rewarding read. It took me quite a while and I had to take breaks from it to read other, more light-hearted books.
Half Scottish, half Indian Rosalind heads back to India in response to her sister's paranoid message that she's being followed by Hijra (a kind of transvestite/transsexual) and lepers and that her husband killed his first wife. When Rosalind arrives, her sister, heavily pregnant, denies everything, saying she was just overly emotional. Rosalind discovers that somebody has been killing Hijra, making it look like suicides and the government is covering it up. This is somehow connected to her brother-in-law. Worried about her sister, she decides to investigate. Meanwhile, she tries to refit herself into the Indian landscape, hoping to reconcile the society she finds with that remembered from childhood. In the process she uncovers conspiracies, cover-ups, and connections. There is quite a bit of violence.
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