SOUNDTRACK: NICOLA BENEDETTI-Tiny Desk Concert #274 (May 6, 2013).
Nicola Benedetti is a Scottish violinist who has had a storied career already.
Benedetti was mentored by Yehudi Menuhin starting at age 10, and won the BBC Young Musician of the Year Award a decade ago. She plays a 1717 Gariel Strad. (It’s worth some $10 million.)
The first piece she plays was instantly recognizable–where had I heard it before? Ah yes, the mournful and harrowing music from Schindler’s List. [Williams: Theme from ‘Schindler’s List’]. She plays it perfectly, of course. It’s evocative and instantly brings back scenes from the film. And then apologizes for it being a bit of sombre start.
Then she plays a piece by Bach–he wrote six sonata and partitas trying to emulate many instruments at once. This one is Bach: “Chaconne from the Partita for Solo Violin in D Minor.” She says she’s not playing the whole thing because it’s 16 minutes long. But she plays the first third which is also recognizable. Once again, it sounds beautiful. The blurb speaks of “the way she makes room for silence in Bach’s Chaconne before tearing deep into its dense warp and weft.” And it is indeed enchanting.
[READ: May 30, 2016] The After-Room
This is the final book in a trilogy (what is it about trilogies that are so popular?) that began with The Apothecary.
This book is set in 1955. (Sarah and I were commenting on how this era of history is an unusual one for stories to be set and how that’s a nice change). Janie and Benjamin are safely back in Michigan after the deadly exploits of the previous book.
Benjamin’s father was killed at the end of the previous book and Janie’s parents have agreed to take care of him–so he is living with them. Janie’s father is quite suspicious of a romance between the two of them and he has every right to be. Janie is certainly in love and Benjamin probably is too, but he has other things on his mind right now.
I had planned to read this book when it came out, but I was involved with a very big book when it came out. But I was at the library with nothing to do so I grabbed this and started reading it and I was hooked immediately. In fact, I found this book so good, so fast paced and exciting that I put down my other reading and just flew through this.
There are a number of different threads in this book and so it took a few pages for me to get up to speed with it all. But Meloy does a great job of filling in gaps and moving the story forward at the same time.
And I love that she jumps into what the After-Room is in just a few pages. Benjamin had made a powder that allowed him to connect with the mind of anyone else who took it. He and Janie had taken it at the end of the last book. And so had he and his father. So Benjamin has been trying (without Janie knowing) to contact his father in the after world.
He has managed to “travel” to a kind of cloudy room with nebulous walls which he has called The After-Room and he can feel his father there. Janie is furious that he is doing this without her–they are supposed to be a team, but she is still fascinated by what he tells her.
Another major character proves to be Ned Maddox. Maddox is a navy man on patrol in the China sea. He is looking for a man who is believed to have stolen a nuclear bomb. When we first meet him, a woman has washed up on the beach where he is stationed. We soon learn that she is Jin-Lo–having washed up on shore after the events of book 2. Luckily for her she washed up on an inhabited island with a man who was sympathetic to her.
There are two new characters added to the story. They play a big role in socializing Janie and Benjamin, although not a big role in the plot, exactly. They are twins, Valentina and Nat. They are friends whom Janie and Benjamin are beginning to feel close to. And they are having a party at which their Uncle Doyle is going to do magic.
They groan at the thought until they see just what Uncle Doyle can do–he seems to be able to move objects and read minds–not just magician stuff but actual mind reading. And soon after the party they learn that that is exactly what Doyle the Magnificent can do. And that’s why he is so cranky and an alcoholic–he can’t turn off the voices in his head.
So Benjamin offers to make him something that will dampen the voices–if Doyle will help him get to the After-Room safely. The last time Benjamin tried, he nearly died or at least almost got stuck there. Doyle agrees, but being the kind of guy he is, he quickly reneges, taking his potion and leaving them to themselves.
We learn a bit more about Ned and why he is on the island so long after the war (he had no real family to return to). And while Jin Lo coul duse the radio she knows he has, he won’t let her give away their location.
The guy who stole the bomb is Thomas Hayes–a former American soldier who as so devastated when his son was killed in action that he decided to take matters into his own hands and steal the nuclear bomb. Jin Lo is floored by this (as it was through her working with Benjamin’s dad that they prevented nuclear destruction in the previous book).
Jin Lo reveals that she is also looking for someone dangerous.
Back home, Benjamin and Janie are being followed. It takes a little time to put this together, but it has something to do with Doyle and his gambling debts and a promise he made to someone he gambles with.
But just as thing st stat to get really dangerous for Janie and Benjamin (her parents know nothing of this of course) the best news happens. Her parents get a job writing a script for a film in production in Italy. (Her parents are scriptwriters who were blacklisted and have been working as teachers). Janie is thrilled and then suspicious–the timing is just too good. Surely it must be a set up, but she can’t say anything to her parents.
But they arrive in Italy and everything seems not only above-board but perfect–and then they learn the (good) reason why this all happened the way it did,
The bulk of Part 2 takes place in Rome. Their comrade Villi is in Rome and he proves to be of invaluable assistance to them. He even connects them with a local street urchin named Primo who runs errands for them. There’ s a wonderful moment later in the book when Pip (yes Pip comes back!) meets up with them and sees Primo and says, “Oh I get it, he’s me.” Pip is now a successful actor and has come to Italy in hopes of getting a job on this film being written by Janie’s parents (so indeed, the film is legitimate).
As with the other two books there is a wonderful amount of supernatural stuff going on, but in very different ways than before. Janie releases dead souls from the After-Room, she also begins to learn telekinesis. She even talks to John Keats (a delightful, comic scene that also shows how the After-Room works.
Meloy has a number of interesting threads going at the same time. So as the book heads toward it very exciting conclusion, you almost forget just how many things are at stake. There’s even a bunch of things I didn’t mention. So as the book nears its end, there’s the matter of the stolen nuclear weapon and the boat full of uranium. En route, Jin Lo and Ned run into a ship full of acrobats who get involved in a few different ways. And there is also the pirate Huang P’ei-mei feared scourge of the sea who has been hired by Danby to find the bomb.
There’s also Pip’s arrival and the question of whether or not he will get a role in this film (he is quite good and really hits it off with the beautiful lead actress).
And then there’s the whole matter of Janie. She was struck by a taxi in Rome and has been in the hospital. She has learned to communicate with the dead (thanks to Keats) but she also knows that if she gets too involved in this, she could wind up stuck their–and the Roman doctors don’t give her much hope.
There were so many exciting things going on in this book–the end of the world, the science, the supernatural, even the romance(s). I was hooked from the start and couldn’t put the book down.
I see that I didn’t enjoy book 2 as much as book 1, but I really enjoyed this exciting conclusion. It did every thing right and was thrilling to boot.
I admit I didn’t enjoy this book as much as the first. In the first book, the magic was more magical, the stakes were higher and the locations were more interesting. (How can post WWII London be more interesting than cargo cult jungles? I think because Meloy writes so wonderfully about the real that the seeming fantasy of private islands and jungles is less gritty). However, it seems like book two in trilogies tend work more as a set up for the thrilling conclusion. Which I’m very much looking forward to.
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