Head in the Clouds

Last year the young turks at Quercus Publishing in London pulled off an interesting coup: they were the first to release Thomas H. Cook’s 16th novel, The Murmur of Stones. I loved that cerebral and slow-paced look at madness and who it can hide within a family. Truly, it was a fine follow-up to Cook’s 2005 novel, Red Leaves.

Murmur has finally been released in the United States and Canada, but under the title The Cloud of Unknowing, and I’m pleased to see that others are raving about this wonderful work, too. Bruce Desilva of The Vancouver Sun writes,

“The Cloud of Unknowing,” Thomas H. Cook’s 16th novel, is a superbly structured tale written in an elegant, literary style. Although it is being marketed as a crime novel, it doesn’t resemble anything you are likely to find on bookshop mystery helves.

This is a book that examines family mythology, genetic determinism, the line between sanity and madness, the difference between intuition and hallucination.

Ask yourself: If Diana hears voices whispering that her son was murdered, is she crazy if the voices are right?

Meanwhile, Leslie McGill of The Kansas City Star seems to understand why Cook’s latest novel was published in the UK first:

The barely controlled hysteria surrounding Cook’s narratives feels more British than American. Although a crime seems to have been committed, there’s none of the police procedural or forensic elements so common to American mysteries.

Although Cook has been nominated for the Edgar award six times in four categories, including winning for Best Novel for The Chatham School Affair, his name is not as well known as that of other mystery writers. This is a shame, because he’s one of the best authors writing today.

Billy Watkins of The Clarion-Ledger, in Jackson, Mississippi, probes deeper and discovers something about Cook’s writing process:

The 59-year-old Cook, who grew up in Ft. Payne, Ala., is one of those rare writers who lets his imagination take the story wherever it wants to go on that particular day--and still wind up with a nonwandering plot line. He calls it “frightening” but says it’s the only way he can work.

“I have (author) friends who have 200-page outlines,” says Cook ... “I have none. Another writer once said that writing without an outline is sort of like driving your car on a road you’re not familiar with ... your lights illuminate a curve here, a curve there. But you don’t know what’s around any of them. I find that an exciting way to develop a book.”

Let’s leave the last word on Cloud/Murmur, though, to Marilyn Stasio of The New York Times. She writes:

But while the suspense is minimal in this first-person account of an underachieving small-town lawyer who fears for the sanity of his gifted but unstable sister, the narrative is sustained by its thematic richness and the subtlety of its psychological portraits of tormented characters.

The only peculiar thing about Stasio’s critique, which at one point chides the author for allowing “his lyrical style to swamp his story,” is that I can’t tell whether she actually likes this book. Maybe she’s just conflicted, like a Cook character herself.