→ November 30, 2018
→ By

Swing Time.

I didn’t love Zadie Smith’s White Teeth when I first read it, but after reflecting on it, I think it’s because it was so unlike anything I’d read before, and over time it continued to grow on me to the point that I included it the last time I ranked my top 100 novels. I read her third novel, On Beauty, but it looks like I never reviewed it; it was a good read, fast-moving, with well-drawn characters and intelligent themes, but it lacked the power of her debut.

Swing Time is her latest novel, coming out at the tail end of 2016, and covers familiar ground – issues of race, class, gender, and nationality in a global world that would like to tell you that it’s post-racial but is anything but. It bears more of the hyperbolic, frenetic nature of her debut novel – especially compared to the sedate On Beauty x – but there’s a new distance between the reader and the two main characters, the narrator and her friend Tracey, two girls of mixed-race parentage who are joined in childhood by a love of dance and separated by a gulf of class between them.

The narrator, never named in the novel, comes from a higher status than Tracey, in part because Tracey’s father is absent for reasons that are explained during the novel – explained, then revised for accuracy, which is also a huge part of the book. The girls love to watch old musicals, especially those of Fred Astaire*, and try to mimic his dance routines, later adapting those of pop singers they see on TV. Through a couple of coincidences, the narrator ends up a personal assistant to one of those singers, Aimee, some sort of teenage icon who has managed to maintain her following into her 30s, and follows the singer around the world while putting much of her own life on hold for the all-consuming job. Aimee eventually decides to build a girls’ school in The Gambia (never named, but identified as a narrow country, split by a river, ruled by a homophobic dictator, surrounded by Senegal, so there aren’t a lot of choices here), dragging her retinue to the country multiple times, falling in love with a local boy and eventually adopting a baby from the village. The narrator flashes back during this story to her childhood and then intermittent encounters with Tracey after they drifted apart, setting her timeline with Tracey, whose dance career never materializes and ends up in straitened circumstances, against the Africa/Aimee storyline with its absurd use of money and the westerners’ attempts to work with the villagers.

* Yep, somehow I read two straight books, this and Connie Willis’ Terra Incognita, that featured the works of Astaire in a prominent role.

These encounters form a scenario where the distinctions of race, class, and national origin are even starker than what the narrator faced as a black woman in England, allowing Smith to rail against western paternalism and the corruption of African nations. (The dictator described in the book, Yahya Jammeh, lost an election a month after the novel’s publication and was forced from power about six weeks after that.) Nobody in the novel comes off that well; perhaps Fernando, a consultant working with Aimee on the school project who brings some needed cynicism to the circus, is the closest to a sympathetic character, but he’s never fleshed out to the extent that the narrator, Tracey, and Aimee are. Tracey is a sort of train wreck in the distance, facing the consequences of poor decisions, including those made by her parents, while the narrator sails into good fortune and eventually fritters some of it away through immaturity.

Swing Time read to me – and I say that recognizing I may miss much of its subtext – as a novel of big ideas that don’t gel on the page. For example, the narrator visits some tourist sites related to the slave trade, a practice that Smith seems to lampoon, but it’s so tangential to the story that it falls from the mind once the narrator returns to the frantic life of her job with Aimee. The singer herself is a mélange of various disposable pop stars and the second act of Madonna, who set up a nonprofit in Malawi that built a pediatric surgery there; she has since adopted four children from the sub-Saharan nation. Smith is satirizing the do-gooders of the west who would plow money into developing nations without considering whether their efforts are in fact doing good, but the depiction seems to argue that westerners, especially white ones, should stay home, when there are obvious examples of such charitable efforts succeeding as well as failing.

As for Tracey … I’m not sure I got where Smith was going with that character’s arc or her relation to the narrator. That the circumstances of our births, from race to socioeconomic status to the environment in which we’re raised, have enormous and perhaps irremediable effects on our lives is not a new thought, yet that seems to be Tracey’s main purpose in the novel. She was born with greater talent, but was unable to convert it, and much of the blame for that falls on her parents or the world as a whole. The narrator was born with less talent, but into better circumstances, and somehow fell into a successful career (albeit not in dance). The world isn’t fair, but again, Smith isn’t giving us any sense of how we might make it a little more so.

That’s not to say Swing Time is anything less than a good read – this is a smart novel with some thematic ambition, and even if the execution is imperfect, Smith is a glorious writer and even her lesser efforts force the reader to open his (my!) mind and confront uncomfortable issues. I suppose seventeen years on, it’s unfair to expect her to churn out White Teeth again, but I know that’s what I want her to do anyway.

Next up: Richard Flanagan’s A Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ November 22, 2018
→ By

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.

I had no idea there was a British author named Elizabeth Taylor, apparently of some repute in the UK, until I saw the name pop up on the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written about ten years ago, and even then knew little about her beyond the Wikipedia entry. I imagine her chagrin at having a world-famous actress (and one who provoked many tabloid headlines) share her name, although perhaps it also pulled some readers toward her books when browsing store shelves. Regardless, she did make that top 100 with her wry comic novel Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, a sweet but unsentimental look at a widow’s move into a long-term hotel that attracted a number of retirees, forming the early equivalent of today’s over-55 communities, and the odd friendship she strikes up with a local writer. (It was adapted into a movie in 2005, but I’ve never seen it and hadn’t heard of it till now.)

Taylor rather deftly creates two parallel narratives around her protagonist and then spins them together to evoke comedy from the intersection. Mrs. Palfrey moves into the Claremont at the beginning of the novel and meets the cast of eccentrics – the busybodies, the would-be lothario, the lonesome, the creep – who populate it. Since the residents are all on the older side, that group will change over the course of the novel, naturally, and the tenor of life in the building (especially in the dining room, the center of most activity) will also shift slightly with each alteration in its makeup. One day, while walking to pick up a library book for another resident, Mrs. Palfrey slips and falls outside the home of Ludo Myers, a would-be writer who spends his days at Harrod’s trying to work on a novel, and who runs out to help her. The two strike up an immediate friendship, as Mrs. Palfrey just appreciates the young Ludo’s kindness while he sees in her a potential muse for his fiction, that drifts into comic territory when she introduces him to her new neighbors at the Claremont as her grandson, Desmond, who really exists but has yet to bother to visit her. (I’m sure you can guess what happens later in the book.)

Mrs. Palfrey was the last of Taylor’s novels published during her lifetime, written when she was into her 50s, and perhaps a look forward at life in old age for a generation that was living longer and more likely to have many years after their children were grown. (She was married and had one child, but unfortunately Taylor died just four years after this book was published at age 63.) One common theme among the denizens of the Claremont is that they’ve largely been forgotten by people in their lives from outside of the Claremont: Adult children don’t show up often, if at all, nor are there many visits or even phone calls from the outside world. And when someone departs from the facility for what we might now call assisted living, the residents seem eager to forget her.

The intersection of her relationship with Ludo, which is somewhat maternal but with the awkwardness of a flirtation, and the way she tries to keep up appearances at the Claremont is the essence of the book’s humor – of course Desmond will show up, and hilarity will ensue. But Ludo also sees Mrs. Palfrey and her mates at the hotel as fodder for the novel he’s been long stymied in writing, a fact of which she’s ignorant, so the question arises for the reader if his affection for her is real or merely functional. The other residents of the Claremont are all stock characters skillfully deployed by Taylor for purposes of humor or pathos, both of a distinctly British variety – there’s little to make you laugh out loud, but much of the book is just witty, and it nicely balances out the obviously grim tone the book takes when one of its elderly characters dies.

This was Taylor’s most critically-acclaimed work, making the Man Booker Prize shortlist in its year, and appeared twice on top 100 lists in the Guardian – the one I use, and another that only included novels published in English (assembled by the same writer, twelve years apart). It’s a brisk, entertaining read, probably worth a more serious meditation on its thoughts on growing old and growing apart from the people who were close to us … but some topics are, perhaps, best left alone when one is in the throes of a good chuckle.

Next up: I’m many reviews behind at the moment, but I’m currently reading Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 24, 2018
→ By

The Pursuit of Love.

Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love appeared on the Guardian‘s 2003 list of the hundred greatest novels of all time (they’ve since produced other lists, but that’s the one I’ve been working through), a very British comedy of manners that focuses more on drawing humor from situations than witty dialogue or more overt humor. The first book in a trilogy of stories starring Fanny as narrator, telling the readers the romantic escapades of her cousins, this one focusing on Linda, her closest friend and a woman driven to love for the wrong reasons until she eventually has one affair that looks like the real thing.

Fanny starts the novel with a lengthy prologue of sorts that sets up the strange family dynamic; she’s growing up with her Aunt Emily and spends much of her time at the home of her cousins and her peculiar Aunt Sadie and gruff Uncle Matthew, as her mother has a habit of leaving her husbands or beaux the moment things become a bit too serious, earning herself the family nickname “the Bolter” as a result. Fanny is more than happy to live with her cousins, however, as she ends up a boisterous household with close friends who join her in various silly adventures and form a secret club they nickname “the Hons” (which appears to be a play on the British way of referring to certain sons or daughters of lesser nobles, the Honourable, abbreviated “Hon.” in writing). Matthew plays the misanthrope but is rather a soft touch where his daughters and nieces are concerned, although he opposes giving the girls much of any education and thus leaves them naïve and unprepared for the larger world.

Linda is the focus of The Pursuit of Love, and pursue she does, grabbing the first suitor who gives her a second glance after her older sister, Louisa, finds a husband, as does Aunt Emily, who marries late (to the ridiculous health-obsessed, fad-chasing Davey, who later finds work as a staff writer for GOOP) and leaves Linda the oldest girl in the group without a mate. She marries poorly, however, as her husband Tony is a financier with little personality and who views a wife as a tool for career advancement rather than as a life partner. After bearing Tony a daughter, much to his parents’ disappointment, Linda, who has no interest in being a mother anyway, is told never to have another child or she may die giving birth, which further loosens her ties to Tony. She eventually absconds with the communist Christian (irony alert), joining him as an activist during the Spanish Civil War, where he largely ignores her for his political work and eventually has a fling with her friend Lavender Davis, which leads her by chance and misadventure to meeting the son of a French duke, Fabrice, who woos her with a charming self-confidence and rather a lot of money, producing what appears to be the one true love of Linda’s life.

There’s a tragicomic aspect to Linda’s entire story here, as she’s chasing something that might not even exist and makes a series of bad choices along the way, while also trying to lord her own romances over others who either don’t have partners or who’ve made more sensible if less exciting matches (of course, whether Christian is “exciting” depends on your point of view). She has a child’s view of love and marriage, and in some passages appears to treat it as some sort of competition with her siblings and cousins; by the time she connects with Fabrice, the Bolter has returned to Matthew’s castle and tries to make Linda her compatriot in serial romances, much to Linda’s great horror.

The Pursuit of Love is wry and sardonic throughout, but it’s not very funny, other than perhaps Mitford poking fun at the hypochondriac Davey, who is constantly changing what he can or can’t eat, often in absurd fashion (for example, making a weird distinction between “red” and “white” foods, but moving foods around to suit what he wants to eat, too). There’s a long tradition in British literature of satires of middle to upper class lives that combine parody with more traditional humor, but Mitford here sticks more to the former, apparently drawing on her own upbringing for some of her source material. The result is a fine novel with a compelling throughline around Linda’s lovelife, but one so light on humor I’d recommend a dozen or more similar books before getting to this one.

Next up: Arundhati Roy’s Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel The God of Small Things.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 27, 2018
→ By

Perdido Street Station.

I didn’t love China Miéville’s Hugo Award-winning novel The City & the City, but I was and still am awed by its inventive setting – a city-state that is divided in two, but where the two independent entities overlap and intertwine, like a Baarle-Nassau taken to an extreme not just of geography but of thought. The story didn’t live up to the creative setup, but the mere idea has really stuck with me in the years since I’ve read it.

His imagination is on display in his sprawling novel Perdido Street Station, which goes so much further in the direction of bizarre science fiction, set on an unnamed planet in a city that feels like it’s from somewhere after civilization has fallen and risen a few times, populated by strange and biologically improbable alien races, including humanoid insects who have to speak in sign language. The novel starts out as if there are going to be a pair of mysteries around the two central characters, but most of that is just a red herring for what’s really coming – an invasion of sorts by giant moths that feed on the dreams of sentient creatures, leaving their bodies functioning but their minds useless. The stories that occupied Isaac and Lin, the human and insect couple (yeah … put a pin in that), turn out to be related to the larger plot but get pushed way to the back burner once the moths show up, and Isaac in particular becomes the reluctant hero who leads a motley crew of outcasts to try to stop the infestation before the moths can breed and ultimate wipe out the entire city. (Not mentioned, however, is what the moths would do for sustenance once they ate everyone’s souls.)

If you get the sense that I didn’t buy any of this, well, good job, because while the prose moved along well and Miéville can certainly keep the pace of the plot quick enough when he wants to, to do so, Miéville piles detail upon detail and twist upon twist, to the point where I found my interest in the story waning from sheer plot fatigue. Isaac’s side project, which turns out to be relevant to the moth quest, is to build an engine that can harness “crisis energy,” a fictional but functionally limitless energy source. There’s a lot of handwaving and “I have to make the math work out” sort of writing here, but it ends up feeling like juvenilia: Great science fiction either explains its fictional science in terms that tie it to real science to keep it credible, or it pushes the fictional science under the hood and tells you not to worry about it. Perdido Street Station does neither.

And then there’s the whole alien races thing, not least of which is the utterly creepy human-insect love story, which Miéville really goes well out of his way to explain, both in how it happened and in how they have sex, a scene that definitely had me reaching for the Raid. Alien species are hardly novel in the world of science fiction, and they’re often quite ridiculous (David Brin, please step to the front). Miéville here seems to have deliberately created extra-weird species, just for the sake of weirdness. There isn’t any compelling reason here to have an intelligent, evolved, humanoid-insect species in the book. It just makes it all weirder and kept puncturing my suspension of disbelief.

One thing Miéville does get right here, however, is make the stakes high. Central characters are injured and killed. There are certainly points where it seems like the moths might eke out a partial if not total victory. By the end of the book, even though the good guys sort of win, the cost has been very high. More writers operating in this space need to work like that – if I know everyone is going to survive to the end of the book (or movie or TV series), then every crisis or potential tragedy you show me feels forced.

I stuck with this through all 700-plus pages in some vain hope of a big payoff to the main plot, but Miéville didn’t quite deliver that either. There were some parts of the heroes’ plan that were extremely clever, and some that didn’t translate well to the page – to the point where I had a hard time picturing any of what was going on. (The moths, by the way, exist in multiple dimensions, as do some other creatures here, making them exceptionally hard to kill.) And for as much as Miéville seems to want the city itself and Perdido Street Station to sit at the heart of the story, I never got much of a picture of the setting, either. The whole book just ended up feeling like a dumping ground for the products of the author’s prodigious imagination, but there just wasn’t enough meat to the story to make it work.

Next up: Almost through Maryn McKenna’s Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ July 20, 2018
→ By

Ice.

I get a daily email from a site called Bookbub that highlights ebooks on sale each day, slightly tailored to my tastes by books or authors I’ve indicated I like; I probably buy 20-25 books a year that way, sometimes picking up titles I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. One of those was Anna Kavan’s final novel, Ice published shortly before her death in 1967, a book and author with which I was completely unfamiliar until I saw the cover in one of those daily emails and thought it sounded interesting enough to pick up (and, at maybe 150 pages total, a small investment to make). It is interesting … and absolutely one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read, defying all conventions of narrative in how it treats characters, time, or even physical reality, giving the reader (well, this reader) the sense of watching or reading someone else’s dream.

Ice is told from the perspective of an unnamed man who is following and possibly trying to protect a frail young woman, also unnamed, in a post-apocalyptic world of nuclear winter, where an ice shelf is pushing civilization back towards the equator. The girl is often with a character called the Warden, who by turns seems to be her lover, her captor, or her protector. But the narrative itself is far from straightforward; the girl is lost, injured, or killed multiple times in the story, only to reappear in the next chapter as if those things never happened. The narrator himself becomes increasingly incoherent as the book progresses, and begins to question his own sanity as the story moves along, and what exactly his feelings are for this girl, who also seems less than happy to be ‘rescued’ by him at several points in the book. Kavan herself called the story a fable, but even that fails to quite prepare the reader for what is now known as slipstream literature, which mimics the jarring, nonlinear nature of dreams or subconscious thought; it’s easier to follow than James Joyce’s attempts to write as the brain thinks, or subsequent authors who’ve done the same (like Eimear McBride), but still brings the sense of being on a rollercoaster in the dark, where you can’t anticipate the turns, drops, or the end of the ride.

Part of what makes Ice simultaneously compelling and offputting is that Kavan never tries to distinguish between what’s real and what is a delusion, dream, or hallucination of the narrator; the prose simply slips from the realistic to the bizarre without any notice to tell you that things have changed or that we’re in the narrator’s head. It’s more than just an unreliable narrator – the narrator here doesn’t seem to know he’s unreliable, and he jumps time and place in dizzying fashion. You have to enjoy that kind of writing to appreciate Ice, and if it were twice the length I would have found it frustrating, but at close to novella size it becomes a sort of thrill ride through a fever dream.

Kavan died mere months after the book’s publication in the UK and a week before its publication in the U.S., so the years of conversation and interpretation that might have followed its release never happened – and the book itself may have come to greater attention because she’d died. There’s an obvious Cold War theme to the story and the setting, both the post-nuclear aspect and the analogy of a frozen world to a war described by temperature, but more interesting to me is the exploration of woman’s agency through the eyes of a man who sees himself as her white knight but may in fact be operating entirely against her wishes. The story starts out in traditional enough fashion, with the Warden the antagonist who is threatening the girl with imprisonment, rape, or death, but it’s never even clear that the narrator and the Warden are on opposing sides, or what the girl, never named and often on the run, actually wants at any point in the book. Her story is actually the pivotal one, yet Kavan gives us barely any details on the girl herself, which seems like a perfect metaphor for the invisible women throughout human history who’ve been ignored by the men who wrote the books.

Next up: I’m reading John Wray’s 2016 novel The Lost Time Accidents.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ December 30, 2017
→ By

Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

I’d only read one Salman Rushdie novel prior to this month, tackling Midnight’s Children back in 2010; I found it a somewhat difficult read, but brimming with imagination, big themes, and incredible prose and wordplay. What I didn’t know until very recently was that he wrote a children’s novel called Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written. It’s quite wonderful, featuring more of the wordplay and creativity that marked Midnight’s Children, reminding me in many ways of The Phantom Tollbooth, one of the best children’s novels I’ve ever read (twice, in fact, once on my own and again to my daughter), and the works of Roald Dahl.

Haroun Khalifa is the young son of Rashid, a storyteller who suddenly loses his gift of narration when his wife leaves him, leaving the two of them without any means of support and Rashid without his identity. When Rashid fails to deliver at a speaking engagement, he and Haroun are whisked off to the Valley of K for his next assignment, speaking for the politician Snooty Buttoo – there are a lot of Butts in this book – only for Haroun to discover that his father has lost his ability to weave stories because Iff the Water Genie is trying to sever Rashid’s imagination. This leads Haroun to learn about the Sea of Stories, the plot by the evil Khattam-Shud to poison it and block its source, and the impending war between the Kingdoms of Chup and Gup that will determine the fate of the Sea.

Rushdie makes Haroun the hero of his own story in the tradition of children in literature who have to do something to save one or both of their parents. Haroun faces difficult choices and shows courage in the face of great odds, standing up to the various otherworldly creatures trying to steal his father’s gift or kill Haroun’s new friends from Gup or sew the lips of the Princess Batcheat shut. (He gets no help from the vacuous Prince Bolo, the antithesis of the typical prince-hero character, generally saying and doing the wrong thing or just showing no awareness of what’s happening around him.)

The text itself is replete with puns, references to Hindustani words or Indian historical figures, and even pop culture references. Iff and the Butts work for the Walrus, who employs technicians named the Eggheads, a reference I trust I don’t have to explain. Butt the Hoopoe certainly sounds like a nod to the British glam-rockers Mott the Hoople. Many names allude to characters in the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, including Haroun al-Rashid, a real-life Caliph of Baghdad who appears in many of those tales. General Kitab’s name means “book” in Arabic and Hindustani, and his army comprises numerous Pages. And the fish with multiple mouths, or maws, are referred to as Plentimaws … and there are Plentimaw fish in the Sea. (The book also has a brief appendix where Rushdie explains many of the character and place names.)

It’s also hard to avoid the likelihood that Rushdie wrote this as a reaction to the fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran after the publication of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the general controversy over a portion of the book that some Muslims deemed blasphemous. In the wake of its release, at least ten countries banned the book in some form, including his native India, while many U.S. bookstores declined to sell it. There were also multiple bombings of bookstores and newspapers in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom related to the book’s sale, while the Archbishop of Canterbury called for an expansion of England’s Blasphemy Act to cover offenses against Islam. (That law was repealed entirely in 2008.) Haroun may be just a children’s novel, but it’s probably also a parable about censorship and the threat to the marketplace of ideas, showing how a society might suffer in a world without stories.

Haroun is better for slightly older kids, because the vocabulary would likely be too demanding for children below fifth grade or so, although the story itself would mostly be appropriate – Haroun’s mother runs off with another man near the beginning, but eventually returns without any real comment – and easy for any child to follow. I could see younger kids being disturbed by the threats to sew the Princess’ mouth shut, although Rushdie softens that possibility by having other characters complain about how awful her singing voice is. It’s a book for younger readers, though, so Haroun saves the day, no mouths are sewn shut, and Rashid eventually regains his talent for weaving stories. The beauty of this book is the journey, the literal one Haroun takes to this other world – I haven’t even mentioned the earth’s second moon, Kahani, which you might not have noticed because it moves by a Process Too Complicated to Explain – and the one on which Rushdie takes the reader, with puns and gags flying so fast that you might miss them on your first read. It’s a delight and a testament to Rushdie’s boundless imagination.

Next up: I’m many books behind in my reviews, but right now I’m reading Kat Kinsman’s memoir Hi, Anxiety: Life with a Bad Case of Nerves.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ November 9, 2017
→ By

Wise Children.

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1984, and then won a special Best of the James Tait Black award in 2012 as the best of the 90-odd winners of the annual honor in its history, beating out such widely acknowledged classics as Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (which was shortlisted), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Robert Graves’ Claudius duology, and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. I read it in April of 2016 and found it impenetrable, between her recursive prose and her seamless mixture of unreality into the realistic narrative, without any core characters to whom I could relate or with whom I could empathize. It’s been only a year and a half since I read it and I’d have a hard time telling you what it was about.

Her last novel, Wise Children, is completely different in everything but prose style – but here the almost Proustian prolixity is far more effective, as it reflects the effusive, vivacious personality of the narrator, Dora Chance. Dora and Nora are twins, the illegitimate offspring of the stage actor Melchior Hazard (I trust you’ve noticed these surnames already), who grow up in and around the theatre and whose lives intersect regularly with those of their biological father, their uncle Peregrine who pretends to be their father when he’s not wandering the globe, and Melchior’s various wives and other children, the latter of whom also come in pairs. The book is a bawdy, boozy, life-affirming comedy, told by Dora as she, her sister, and Melchior’s first wife, the Lady Atalanta, prepare to attend Melchior’s one hundredth birthday party.

Carter employs a ton of wordplay in the book, with double meanings, allusions, and rhyming. Referring to a little closet where a lost cask is found at one point, she has Dora call it “the place where the missus could stow away the master if the master came home plastered.” Her prose is musical, and the puns can be auditory or visual (Peregine calling his nieces “copperknobs,” a deviation from the British slang term for a redhead “coppernob,” and then referring to them getting the “key to the door” when they turn eighteen). I’m sure I only caught a fraction of the references to Shakespeare, English poetry, Greek mythology, and more.

The narrative itself is also unorthodox; it’s written like a memoir, but Dora can’t exactly walk a straight line (unsurprising, given her self-professed alcohol intake) when delving into the past, and her reliability is questionable – or Carter is employing a little magical realism, especially when Peregrine is involved. Much of the comedy is situational, as Carter weaves a web of love/hate relationships among the various half-siblings, parents, uncles, and associates, complete with mistaken identities and the Chances taking advantage of others’ inability to tell them apart. There’s a lot of booze, a lot of sex, and a fair amount of confusion over who is actually the father of each set of twins – much of that fostered by Melchior himself, as his interest in fatherhood is directly tied to its utility in his stage career.

This book appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels of all time, rather than Nights at the Circus, and although that opinion seems contrarian I’d have to agree with it. This is more accessible, funnier, and far more engaging. I’d challenge anyone who reads this to not adore the Chances, who make effrontery their primary coping mechanism in a world that would often rather forget their existence, and who turn the randomness of life into a series of opportunities. It wouldn’t make my top 100 novels list, but it is an incredibly fun, erudite book that regularly had me laughing out loud.

Next up: I’ve got 100 pages to go in Dan Vyleta’s Smoke.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 28, 2017
→ By

A Gun for Sale.

I’m on record as a huge Graham Greene fan, both of his serious novels and his “entertainments,” primarily because his writing was so crisp and evocative. Greene’s prose established the time and place with a minimum of verbiage. His 1936 entertainment A Gun for Sale, the 20th of his novels I’ve read, veers a bit towards the silly end of the spectrum, a bit more cliched than his later works, although it is still a pleasure to read and, as with all of his writing, infuses humanity into his villains and blurs the lines between the good and the bad.

Raven is both protagonist and antagonist in the book, a hired killer with a facial disfigurement that leads him to an abundance of caution and a strategy of eliminating any witnesses because he’d be too easy to identify. The novel opens with a scene of him in Prague, killing a foreign minister and one witness, only to discover that the man who hired him has double-crossed him, putting Raven on the run and also bent on revenge. The assassination was supposed to trigger a second European war, although the plot unravels in the background as Raven is hunted by authorities, including the ambitious police detective Jimmy Mather. A coincidental meeting puts Mather’s girlfriend, Anne Crowder, in the path of “Cholmondely,” the man who hired Raven but paid him in stolen banknotes, and she eventually intersects with Raven as well, helping him escape temporarily when she hears his side of the story.

The actual reasons for the assassination are at the same time overly familiar and tiringly current: A munitions manufacturer wants war to break out so he can make more money. (The manufacturer is Jewish, and Greene’s pre-WWII work was typical of the period of English literature in its casual use of anti-Semitic phrases and stereotypes.) It’s the least interesting part of the story, too, but becomes critical in the resolution. Greene does much better in making Raven a three-dimensional character – why he is who he is, how he feels persecuted at every step – and turning Anne into an important actor in the plot and giving her real moral dilemmas without clear right and wrong options. By the end of the novel, I wasn’t sure why she would still be interested in Mather, who seems a bit dull for her, whereas Greene leaves the reader with the strong implication that Mather had to choose to take her back after her role in helping Raven escape arrest at least once over the course of the novel.

Cholmondeley, pronounced “Chumley” and possibly named Davis, is a typical Greene villain, dotted with peculiar flourishes (e.g., a sweet tooth) that give a superficial sense of reality to what would otherwise be a sort of one-note scumbag. He had no qualms whatsoever about selling Raven out; if anything, he seems like he might have enjoyed it had Raven not gotten away from the police. He’s creepy with women and creepy in his personal habits, and when Anne ends up cornered by him, it’s one of the best horror scenes Greene ever wrote, even though it’s entirely of the psychological sort and ends the chapter with a pulpy cliffhanger.

Greene’s best novels bridge the gap between his spy-novel work and his attempts to tackle more serious themes, dealing with matters of politics rather than the theological questions of his Catholic novels. (Greene’s own Catholicism was complicated; he converted to marry a Catholic woman, but they separated and he was a notorious philanderer, often sleeping with friends’ wives, and described himself later in life as a “Catholic atheist.”) In The Quiet American, Greene explores and exposes the deep hypocrisies of western powers fighting a proxy war in Vietnam. In Our Man in Havana, my favorite of his novels, he lampoons British intelligence services and their willingness to believe anyone who tells them what they want to hear, a story that bears many elements of the real Operation Mincemeat and that was later imitated in John Le Carre’s The Tailor of Panama. A Gun for Sale feels like a precursor to those later novels – an entertainment, certainly, but one bearing elements of the cynicism about war that would populate many of Greene’s later, better works outside of the Catholic novels. It’s a quick read, well short of 200 pages, instructive in the broader continuum of Greene’s work and a sign of how his attempts to split his output into two camps broke down over time as serious themes bled into the works he tried to distinguish as mere spy novels.

Next up: I’m reading John T. Edge’s The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South and am also about 80% through the audiobook version of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. (Same as yesterday.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ August 23, 2017
→ By

Moriarty.

I’m on record as saying Anthony Horowitz’s Foyle’s War is my favorite television series ever, although I admit I’m sort of stretching the boundaries – like many British series, Foyle’s War is more like an ongoing sequence of made-for-TV movies, with each episode running about 90 minutes and with a completely self-contained story. The mystery series, starring Michael Kitchen as the marvelously taciturn DCS Foyle, ran for eight seasons across fourteen years, with 28 episodes set from 1940 to 1947. Horowitz wrote most of the episodes himself, crafting memorable three-dimensional characters along with tightly-plotted mysteries worthy of the greats of the genre.

Horowitz is also a successful novelist and has the distinction of being the first writer authorized by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle to use the Sherlock Holmes and John Watson characters in a new work of fiction. (The characters are in the public domain in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, so any author can use them in his/her works.) The second of his two novels in the Holmes universe, Moriarty, doesn’t actually include Holmes or Watson, but instead builds a new mystery around some secondary characters, including the titular villain who himself only appeared in one Holmes story, “The Final Problem,” where the two tangle at the Reichenbach Falls and appear to drop to their deaths. In the wake of that event, a leader of American organized crime appears to be moving into London to fill the void left by Moriarty’s death, and it is up to Scotland Yard Inspector Athelney Jones and Pinkerton detective Frederick Chase (who narrates) to try to track the killer down.

Moriarty doesn’t seem at all like Conan Doyle’s work; it’s fast, breezy, light on character, and frankly loaded with silliness, both poor work by Inspector Jones and overuse of graphic violence by Horowitz. Holmes is legend because he’s charming in his aloofness and impressive in his deductive powers. Neither Jones nor Chase brings an ounce of charisma to the book, while the various tough guys they encounter are garden-variety bimbos who could have left the pages of any pulp noir story to make a few extra bucks by appearing here. We even get the ultimate cliché, the scene where the protagonist (in this case, both of them) gets knocked unconscious and wakes up in captivity, to which Horowitz brings nothing new whatsoever.

To the extent that Moriarty works at all, it’s because of the Twist, and it’s a big one. Without that, this is a bad mystery or a bad detective novel. With it, well, it’s something. It might be a clever puzzle, but I felt like I’d been conned. The reveal includes references to some of the clues you might have picked up on earlier in the book, but not only did I not see them, nothing even tipped me off that I should be considering the possibility of a con. You can write an entire novel in the first person, and then open the last chapter with, “Whoops! I lied,” but that doesn’t make it a good novel. Give me a fair shot to figure out the truth and I won’t feel cheated when I fail to do so. Horowitz always did that in his TV work, but left that element out of Moriarty, ruining the work for me.

Next up: I’m still several books behind but am back on the Pulitzer trail with Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary, which won in 1929.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ July 21, 2017
→ By

The Strangler Vine.

M.J. Carter’s historical novel The Strangler Vine has the feel of a murder mystery without an actual murder, instead sending its two central characters on a quest in 1837 India to find a missing Briton who disappeared into the north, likely of his own volition, but whose importance to the East India Company has grown in his absence. It’s a fast read thanks to the tremendous narrative greed in the story and the yin/yang Carter created in her two protagonists, but I found the dialogue completely inappropriate for the time period, as she gives her characters modern vernacular and even sensibilities that feel very out of place in this setting.

The story opens with the young Captain (soon to be Lieutenant) William Avery in Calcutta, chosen seemingly as a last resort, to delivery a message to the reclusive company agent Jeremiah Blake and later to accompany Blake on the mission to find the missing author and poet Xavier Mountstuart (which sounds like an Orioles prospect), who has stirred up quite a bit of trouble with the publication of a novel that paints both the Company and the behavior of British expats on the subcontinent in a rather unfavorable light. This comes just as the Company is trying to expand its influence over greater portions of what we know now as India, which at the time was split into many nation-states or local fiefdoms as with pre-unification Italy, and the disappearance of the author has only further complicated the efforts to bring more of the region under the British company’s control. The Europeans are also combatting the plague of Thuggee, a supposed band of marauding bandits who worship the goddess Kali; rob and murder travelers in heinous, ritualistic fashion; and threaten stability in the region as well as local trade. (Thuggee, or at least the campaign against it, was real, and the English word “thug” is derived from its name.) A handful of real historical personages, including the famed William Sleeman, appear in the book, so portions of the story will be obvious if you happen to know something about the time period.

The core suspense story in The Stranger Vine is well-crafted and manages some unpredictable elements even though you’ll see some of the ending coming because we know some of the macro results of the British role in India (especially that the Company was eventually removed from power and replaced by a colonial administration that lasted until independence and Partition in 1948, creating the modern borders of India, Pakistan, and later Bangladesh). There’s a bit of a whodunit here, but the identity of the ultimate bad guy is subordinate to the journey, which Carter animates with strong action sequences and vivid descriptions of both the landscape and the various battles that befall our heroes. Blake is the stronger of the two main characters, an erudite humanist unhinged by the death of his native wife, disillusioned by the Company yet still nominally in its employ, and a spy-like investigator who keeps Avery in the dark for much of the story. Avery, while amiable in his naivete, is more simply drawn and serves as a chronicler whose involvement in the action of the plot is less than Blake’s in total but includes a couple of high points that allow for some character development.

However, Carter hasn’t captured the vocabulary or rhythm of speech from the time period – an observation I make based on novels I’ve read from that era – and has given some of her characters decidedly 21st-century views. When a man makes a (sexual) pass at Avery, the religious 21-year-old politely rebuffs the attempt and the matter is simply dropped – difficult to accept in an era when homosexuality was illegal and seen as a grievous sin. Blake’s concern for the plight of locals under the Company may have been apposite for the time, yet he speaks and acts with an egalitarian perspective that would mark him as a progressive in 2017, let alone in the 1830s. And the antagonists of the story, notably those with the Company who seek to control the subcontinent, are kind of not racist enough, with their opinions of locals marked more by cultural elitism than outright prejudice – the Indian people need the Brits to install a government, to teach them democracy, to raise them out of heathenism, but in a paternalist sense rather than the overt bigotry I’d expect from that time. (She hints at phrenology once in the book, but only to have Blake dismiss it as junk science.)

If you prefer to read for story, The Stranger Vine will be among the more satisfying contemporary novels you read; the plot works, and even with Carter’s missteps in dialogue, she never talks down to the reader or takes easy outs with her characters. I would still say I really enjoyed the book even as the inaccurate tone irked me, because there’s something so meticulous about the story’s construction. It’s merely a bit flawed, but in a way that may only matter to certain readers.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,