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Monday morning I will be 28 years old, and undeniably in my late 20s. I’m always a bit troubled by how quickly time is passing, and how much I wanted, and still want, from life. At the same time, things are going great and I’m feeling far more optimistic about the future than I was a year ago.

So what will I do with these waning days of my mid-20s? I will let them wane as all the others did, with videogames, cooking, and books.  I’ve been loving A Game of Thrones the last couple days, even if it is torture watching tragically flawed characters walking around with targets painted on their backs.

But I like, and even draw comfort from, the way one of the book’s themes is that misfortuneis inevitable, and the heroes are those who confront that head-on. I do not mean that they overcome adversity. That’s often another false hope, another lie we tell ourself. I mean that they accept that the fates are cruel, and so characters like Tyrion or Ned Stark aim for something that cannot be taken by force or fate: self-mastery.

Whether this really serves those around you, or whether it is in some way a selfish indulgence, is another question.

Outside of that, I will be playing some EYE: Divine Cybermancy for review, and at some point I must sneak in a viewing of Life with Father. Aside from that, I’ll be trying to get my Lotus to stop flying off the track at Silverstone in F1 2010, and perhaps destroying some cars in Burnout: Paradise when F1 gets frustrating.

War in the East was one of those wargames that sent me across town to the local library so that I could grab a stack of books on the Eastern Front. I finally finished off the last of them, Leningrad 1941: The Blockade by Dmitri Pavlov, yesterday morning. In many ways it was the most unexpected of the books I read, because so much of its subject was both new (t0 me) and uniquely presented.

Pavlov was a Party bureaucrat who helped managed the distribution of food supplies to the Leningrad Front during the German blockade following Operation Barbarossa. His book is, in some ways, nothing more than a simple report on the food situation in Leningrad during the siege. He describes the city’s pre-blockade food consumption and supplies, the impact of the German advance, the rations provided during the siege, and finally how the city was resupplied by water and, after Lake Ladoga froze, by ice.

The book is full of tables and detailed calorie counts. Just from a mechanical standpoint, the work of maintaining a defensive force and a large civilian population during a near-total encirclement makes for fascinating reading. The type of things I don’t really think about, like how much food an office worker needs to sustain himself as opposed to a front line soldier as opposed to a longshoreman. This was the stuff of life and death in Leningrad as Pavlov and the Soviet officials he worked with cut rations to the bone.

But it’s also an amazing story of endurance and ingenuity, and one of the threads running through Pavlov’s account is a nostalgia for this brief moment when the ideals of the Revolution were manifested in the people, soldiers, and government of Leningrad. He describes how, as the food supply dwindled, researchers in Leningrad were furiously trying to find new ways to stretch the food supply. He goes into detail on how the loaf of bread was reinvented with other grains and low-quality food products, and then reinvented again with cellulose once the other grains ran out.

While Pavlov is no naif (he describes how ration-card fraud required some brutal measures and regulations that were often unintentionally, unavoidably cruel), he is struck by how often the siege brought out the best in people. Order never broke down, even when things were at their most desperate. He draws pictures of starving people holding down a man who attempts to start a bread riot, or standing guard over an overturned bread truck in the dead of a winter night until the authorities can collect the shipment. He frankly admits that when the road over Lake Ladoga first started running, theft was rampant on the part of the drivers and loaders. The operation was so haphazard, the packing materials of such poor quality, and the pace so fast that there was literally no way to police the supply line. But after a week or so, as drivers realized just how desperate things were in Leningrad, supply loss stopped almost entirely.

The suffering on display is also astonishing. During a chapter simply titled, “Hunger”, Pavlov writes:

Cold had settled down to stay in the unheated apartments of the city. Remorselessly it froze the exhausted people. Dystrophy and cold sent 11,085 people to their graves during November, the first to fall under death’s scythe being the old men.

…More and more adults and children died every day. First a person’s arms and legs grew weak, then his body became numb, the numbness gradually approached the heart, gripped it as in a vise, and then the end came.

Death overtook people anywhere. As he walked along the street, a man might fall and not get up. People would go to bed at home and not rise again. Often death would come suddenly as men worked at their machines.

Since public transportation was not operating, burial was a special problem. The dead were usually carried on sleds without coffins. Two or three relatives or close friends would haul the sled along the seemingly endless streets, often losing strength and abandoning the deceased halfway to the cemetary, leaving to the authorities the task of dispoising of the body. …There was not strength enough to dig into the deeply frozen earth. Civil defense crews would blast the ground to make mass graves, into which they would lay tens and sometimes hundreds of bodies without even knowing the names of those they buried.

–May the dead forgive the living who could not, under those desperate conditions, perform the last ceremonies due honest, laborious lives.

Over 600,000 people died of starvation-related causes during the blockade.

A few years ago I read Adrian McKinty’s Dead I Well May Be, which instantly became one of my all-time favorite crime novels. In addition to being a blood-curdling revenge story, it was also a collection of surprisingly lyrical vignettes to different worlds: Belfast in the waning years of the Troubles, a city of desultory terrorism and economic stagnation. New York in early 1990′s, disorderly, larcenous, crazed.  The poor Protestant neighborhoods of the Six Counties over a decade into the Troubles, desperately clinging to a precious few privileges over the Catholics.

McKinty had a knack for sketching sharp characters and scenes with just a few choice details. His characters spoke with different voices, but all filtered through the wry and fatalist gaze of protagonist Michael Forsythe. He had a soft-spot for the underdogs and hopeless fuck-ups, people who chose to trust and love despite being given few reasons to do either. And Forsythe himself, too young for the work he did and far too careless to understand the import of the choices he was making, was one of them. He was just smart enough to know it.

Dead I Well May Be turns into a nightmare journey for the second act, and that gives way to a chilly, purposeful series of killings in the third act. By the time it ends, it has become a triumphant tragedy, the dead bodies piled high after glorious vengeance. Forsythe goes about his work with compassion and understanding, but not an ounce of mercy. It’s exhilarating to see it unfold.

The strength of that book made me a McKinty fan, but it didn’t take long before I started to worry that Dead I Well May Be was a flash in the pan. Hidden River, the story of a disgraced Royal Ulster Constabulary detective trying to solve a friend’s murder in Colorado, had its moments but was ultimately a dud. Not a single character was appealing, and the story behind the murder was devoid of any sense or import. The Dead Yard, the sequel to Dead I Well May Be, was a crushing disappointment.

McKinty seemed to be straining so hard to recapture the magic of Dead I Well May Be that he was turning into a parody of himself. His prose crossed that line from lush to purple, and his use of foreshadowing began to smack of narrative laziness. Rather than showing anything interesting happening, he just kept promising that interesting things would, eventually, happen. Most of them in another book.

The final part of the Forsythe trilogy, The Bloomsday Dead, was better than his other efforts but still a far cry from Dead I Well May Be. He never managed to make the case that Forsythe’s was a story that needed continuing, and the conclusion to the saga relied on a couple predictable twists and some unconvincing behavior on the part of some of the characters.

So I had just about written McKinty off. He’d produced one great novel, one decent one, one mediocrity, and one disaster. However, I gave him one last shot with his latest novel, Fifty Grand, and I’m thrilled to find that he is once again near the top of his game. This is easily his best work since Dead I Well May Be, and is also a marked departure from his other novels.

Fifty Grand is superficially a revenge mystery. A Cuban detective, Mercado, illegally leaves the country to find out what happened to her father when he was killed in a wealthy Colorado town.

That’s just the backdrop, however, for a story about class and illegal immigration. We know that Mercado is a smart professional and a first-rate cop on a fifth-rate police force, but in America she is nothing. Posing as a worker from Mexico City, she is given the choice of being a sex worker or a cleaning lady. The local police turn a blind eye to the illegals who are building their city and serving its elites. The human traffickers who run the immigration operation treat the workers as indentured servants. For everyone else, the Latinos are invisible. Just a bunch of Mexicans, whether they’re Mexican or not, here to build houses, clean them once they’ve been built, and occasionally to screw in them for money.

There is a scene where Mercado witnesses the sheriff administer a savage beating to her boss, Esteban, in front of her and another maid. After the sheriff drives off, Esteban tries to stop crying as he shakes with fury in the driver’s seat of his Navigator. He starts muttering that the sheriff couldn’t do this to him, he was an American citizen. Then he starts to cry as he says that all this, from Colorado to the Pacific, used to be Mexico. And he weeps.

Poignancy and irony are laced throughout this scene. Characters can be aware of the artificial distinctions and prejudices that are the bedrock of most discrimination, yet their ubiquity still makes those characters complicit in inequality. Esteban gets treated like shit because he’s a Mexican, and his reaction is to feel outrage because he’s an American citizen. It’s okay to abuse and humiliate illegals, he accepts that, but it’s outrageous to ask an Hispanic American citizen to accept such treatment. He accepts that American citizenship grants him superiority to the people who come over illegally from Mexico, but then he denies that Americans have any moral right to the southwest that they took from Mexico at gunpoint. Esteban, a Mexican, a citizen, and a trafficker, is mired in contradictions, chafing against a racist regime in which he is complicit.

This is a McKinty novel, however, and there is still a lot of room for lyrical violence and bloodshed. He sets the tone early with this passage, as Mercado tries to explain why she is out to avenge the murder of a man who abandoned her as a child.

Revenge is a game for pendejos. Hector says that tit for tat is a base emotion, from the lizard brain, from way, way down. He says we’ve evolved beyond revenge. Witnesses at executions always leave dissatisfied, and he would know, he’s seen dozens. But it’s not about feeling good, Hector. It’s about something else. It’s about tribal law, it’s about the restoration of order. Entropy increases, the universe winds down, and one day all the suns go out and the last living entity ceases to be. It’s about accepting that, accepting that there’s no happy place, no afterlife, no justice, just a brief flowering of consciousness in an infiinty of nothing–it’s about seeing all that and then defying the inevitable and imposing a discipline on chaos, even as the boilers burst and the ship goes down.

This neatly describes nearly every McKinty protagonist’s motivation. They are not history’s winners. They hunt the privileged and powerful, the people who will resort to violence and betrayal when they have nothing to fear, who cite the law when it is on their side, and who cry for mercy when they are on their knees with a gun pointed at their head. In this universe, justice is a mirage, a trick played on the downtrodden. The only safety is in the promise of retribution.