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THE complex history of the Languedoc area in France has proved fertile territory for Kate Mosse in her recent trilogy of adventure novels, beginning with the phenomenally successful Labyrinth in 2005, shortly to be a mini-series, and now reaching its conclusion in Citadel.

Labyrinth was concerned with the Albigensian crusade and the destruction of the Christian Cathar heresy in the 13th century, weaving historical truth with the legends of the holy grail that flourished after the final massacre of the Cathars at their fortress of Montségur.

This idea of a connection between the story of a secret Cathar treasure and the grail was given substance in the 20th century by the work of Otto Rahn, a German historian and SS officer from WWII who believed that the Cathars held the key to the grail mystery, and that the evidence was somewhere beneath the ruins of Montségur. His writings attracted the attention of German high commander Heinrich Himmler, whose own fascination with the occult, and with the possible ancient pedigree of an Aryan race, led to the founding of the Ahnenerbe, a society dedicated to research into proving the historical origins of a master race.

This Nazi connection provides a richly dramatic setting for Citadel. The novel takes place largely between 1942 and 1944, between the occupation and liberation of southern France.

Mosse has marshalled a large cast of characters, although (as in Labyrinth and its successor, Sepulchre in 2008) the story centres around a determined young heroine, in this case 18-year-old Sandrine Vidal, an orphan living with her older sister in Carcassonne. Sandrine is shocked out of her innocence in the summer of 1942 when her life is saved by a young resistance fighter, Raoul Pelletier, just as he discovers that his network has been infiltrated by a spy, Leo Authié, working for the Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence agency. When a bomb goes off at a crowded, peaceful demonstration, Raoul realises he has been set up by Authié to look like the perpetrator. He goes on the run, aided by Sandrine and her sister, Marianne, who is already working with the resistance.

But Authié wants Raoul for his own purposes: Raoul is in possession of a map belonging to his former comrade, Antoine, who died under torture at the hands of Authié's henchman without revealing its whereabouts. Beneath his official guise, Authié is a kind of latter-day inquisitor, obsessed with restoring the purity of the Catholic faith; he knows that Antoine corresponded with Otto Rahn, and suspects that before Rahn's death the German passed to Antoine a map revealing the whereabouts of an ancient codex containing a secret so powerful it could change the course of the war. The Ahnenerbe are also pursuing this codex, apparently with Authié's assistance, though to their cost they fail to realise that his motivation for securing it is quite different to theirs.

As in the first two books, Mosse sets up two narrative threads progressing in parallel, though the difference here is that neither concerns the present day. Although the principal story follows Sandrine and her friends as they attempt to find the codex, while evading capture and throwing Authié and his collaborators off the scent, we also glimpse the far distant history of the region in the subplot of the codex's original journey into the mountains, in the hands of a young, fourth-century monk risking death to save the heretical text from the flames.

Though the elements of fantasy and magic require a firm suspension of disbelief (there is a whiff of Tolkien about the alleged powers of the codex), what capture the reader most powerfully are the horrors of the Nazi threat and the sacrifices necessary to survive and resist, which make Citadel feel the most substantial and mature of the trilogy.

Mosse has grounded her story in exhaustive research, as testified by the bibliography, but she wears her learning lightly, keeping the characters and their personal dramas to the fore, switching neatly between perspectives to maintain tension. She has a particular knack for creating vivid action scenes — the blood, debris and panic of a bomb attack, or a skirmish – but she describes with equal precision the small, daily hardships of life under occupation: the endless paperwork, the difficulties of communication, the twitching curtains next door. Fans of the previous two books will be pleased to find characters and themes recurring here, most notably the magus figure of Audric Baillard, the enigmatic scholar who has lived many centuries and seems to embody the resilience of the land and its people.

Citadel is a deeply satisfying literary adventure, brimming with all the romance, treachery and cliffhangers you would expect from the genre. It is also steeped in a passion for the region, its history and legends, and that magical shadow world where the two meet. – Guardian News & Media

Ten Things I've Learnt About Love

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THE title of this book is unfortunately reminiscent of that teen rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You. It's also misleading ... or perhaps the fact that I was misled just shows that I am a romantic and sentimental fool, immediately thinking the title referred to the love between a man and woman. It doesn't, and there are no love-lorn, star-crossed teenage lovers in it – thank goodness.

Instead, there is a girl, Alice who is searching for ... what exactly? She doesn't quite know, but it's obvious that she's the sort always looking for some elusive thing. When we first meet Alice she is just back from Mongolia, summoned home by her sisters to their father's deathbed. Alice's relationship with her family is difficult, awkward. We're not sure why. Is it some family thing? A past event that has left it's mark? Or is the cause Alice herself?

Sarah Butler's initial sketch of a girl waiting for a taxi at London's Heathrow airport is deft, delicate and painfully revealing. It's obvious that she's lost or has lost something. Someone? The pain I felt reading that opening chapter scared me, but I was lost too – in love, at first read. Butler's best gift, I realised as I kept on reading, is to draw the reader really close to her characters.

You can feel their warmth, hear their voices, smell their skin. I loved Alice from the first chapter, as her thoughts bounced round her head and her memories hurt her. I wanted to protect her, but I knew I was going to get my heart broken.

Alice is the youngest of three sisters. We see them, Tilly and Cee, through her eyes and they are familiar and family, and yet ... there is a barrier. Is it all in Alice's head? Cee disapproves of Alice's wanderlust. Tilly is awash with sadness. Alice doesn't make a complete set of three. She seems to stand apart. Their father tells Alice that he loves her "as much as the others" and then he says he has something to discuss with her sisters, just her sisters.

Alice's confusion, mingled with her grief, is overlaid with a constant nagging doubt and fear. It's conveyed subtly and powerfully, in every half gesture, every fleeting thought, in what she remembers, the pictures that keep recurring, the things and people and past she longs for.

And then there's Daniel. His story alternates with Alice's, and each chapter begins with a list of 10: What she knows about her mother, who died when she was four; what he's frightened of; places she's had sex; things he'd say to his daughter. Daniel is homeless. A calm and quiet presence you can't feel sorry for. He's not a victim, and he's not defiant, or defensive about his situation. He has a daughter he's never seen, but he knows her name. He sends her letters (with no address) and he leaves her messages, made with found objects, around London. As a synaesthete, Daniel associates letters and words with certain colours, and he thinks of his daughter's name as ice blue.

So the book's back cover blurb talks about fathers and daughters, and it's easy to guess where Alice and Daniel are headed. Suddenly you know why she feels bereft and alone, that it's more than not remembering her mother and losing the man she's always considered to be her dad. She's lost something she didn't really know she had in the first place, but perhaps she sensed that a connection was being attempted and led her to wander, in all sorts of ways, searching, looking, attempting in her own way to connect.

When she finally meets Daniel, something happens to Alice. She doesn't know why but she doesn't question it too much. Reading about their unfolding relationship, I feel a sense of hope and comfort, and that relief you get at the end of a long journey that you know will end with the familiar and the loved.

Butler's debut is a graceful and elegant symphony of words that give the impression of stillness and melancholy – a pale grey sky; wet leaves on the grass; the wind whistling in the trees; and then, a sudden lifting of the spirits – weak sunshine; the sky turning gold and blue; the sharp smell of a bonfire; your heart leaping when you recognise the writing of a beloved on an envelope, his voice on the line, his smile in a crowd.

I am romantic and sentimental, and Ten Things I've Learnt About Love didn't have to be about lovers to move me. Love is love, no matter how it's felt, expressed or shaped. Butler expresses that more than beautifully here.

The 5th Wave

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PERHAPS it was a leftover effect from my last book review, but The 5th Wave kept reminding me of different stories that I've seen or read before. Now, this does not actually reflect badly on the book itself. Although many of the crucial elements in the book are not strictly original, it was still well-written and gripping enough that I was quite absorbed in the story.

I mean, how many different ways can aliens invade the Earth after all?

In this case, in five waves – an element that reminded me of the tv series First Wave (1998-2001), in which the protagonist Cade Foster works to stop the first of three waves planned by the alien species, the Gua, to invade Earth and destroy humanity.

In this book, the first four waves have already happened, as we learn through the memories of the main protagonist, 16-year-old Cassie Sullivan. Currently, only about 2% of the human population is still alive, and they can't even trust one another because the aliens look exactly like humans.

Now, this plot point reminded me of The Host (2013) – the movie based on the book by Stephanie Meyer, which I haven't read. In Meyer's Host, the aliens invade Earth by inserting their consciousness into human bodies, effectively "killing" their host's own consciousness (which in turn references the many movies made based on Jack Finney's 1954 sci-fi novel, The Body Snatchers).

In The 5th Wave, aliens have been "downloaded" into the impressionable minds of certain fetuses while they were still in the womb. These aliens stayed "asleep", yet aware for several years as their bodies grew up normally, until the time came for the invasion plan to be activated, and they "awakened" to start positioning themselves as sleeper agents among humanity.

The revealing of these sleeper agents constituted the fourth wave, effectively creating distrust and paranoia among the remaining humans, making them unable to unite to fight back against the aliens. However, one army base manages to not only overcome the alien sleeper agents who turned against them, but also discover an alien programme that allows them to see who has an alien consciousness and who doesn't.

The problem is, as Cassie discovers when a group from this base comes across her band of survivors, these soldiers aren't all that benign either, as they only take away the children from the survivors, including her five-year-old brother Sammy.

The viewpoints in the book switch between a few main characters, all of whom are tied back to Cassie.

While Cassie is trying to survive alone outside, the reader gets to learn more about what's going on in the army base through the eyes of her high school crush, Ben Parrish, as well as Sammy.

After surviving the death of his whole family, Ben is now being trained as a soldier to kill the aliens. This is the part that might disturb some readers as those being trained to be soldiers are all children, mostly under 15 years of age, as only this age group is considered as being completely clear of alien influence. Some of the children are as young as five, like Sammy, with the minimum age of an active soldier being a mere seven years of age. And trust me, the basic training is every bit as brutal as that for adult soldiers.

However, there is more to this army and training than meets the eye; a fact that Ben and Cassie eventually discover separately.

Along the way, Cassie is also rescued by a farmboy called Evan Walker, another lone survivor of the first four waves.

He eventually agrees to help Cassie fulfil her promise of going after Sammy – an act that brings all four of these main characters together in the climax of the book.

Author Rick Yancey does a good job of giving each character his or her own voice and realistic personality.

Fortunately, he doesn't overemphasise the romance part, although it does play an important part in the novel.

The story moves along at a good pace, and I was absorbed enough to finish it in two sittings. The concepts, while not totally original, were solid and interesting enough.

If you liked either First Wave or The Host, or the TV series Falling Skies (2011-now) – also about a group of survivors banding together to keep alive and waging a guerilla war against alien invaders – then it's likely that you'll enjoy this book too.

While the story concludes rather definitively, I felt that the actual note it ended on trailed off rather than ending strongly.

So that, along with the current propensity of authors and publishers to do things in threes, shouldn't make it too big of a surprise to learn that this is the first book in trilogy.

I can kind of guess where the second book is going to go, but hopefully, Yancey will keep up his strong writing to make it an equally enjoyable book, original concepts or not.

Kredit: www.thestar.com.my

Khamis, 4 Julai 2013

The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf

The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf

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