Month: April 2023

Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle

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Memoirs come in many different forms. Some tell a chronological story, while others center around a theme. Some experiment with different structures. First published in 1972, this first in a series of memoirs by the author of A Wrinkle in Time and other beloved stories is more of a meditation, inviting us to explore with her, follow her thoughts, and see where they take us.

In the process, L’Engle gives us the kaleidoscope of her life at 51: spouse, parent, writer, teacher, choir director, member of communities large and small.

Many of her reflections are about writing in general, and specifically writing for children. She’s forthright about her years of rejections and how she felt about them. Invited to teach, she maintains that writing cannot be taught, but you can teach particular tools. Of course, she learns as much as she teaches, classroom discussions leading to new ideas.

She also defends children’s literature: its enduring appeal, its benefits for children and adults, and its literary quality.

L’Engle notes that “the concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline.” In those moments, we are not conscious of ourselves, not self-conscious. She goes on to say: “Detachment and involvement: The artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.”

At one point she says that “An author is responsible for his characters in much the same way that a parent is for his children, or a teacher for his students.” I think she means a moral responsibility, but it is still a concept that I’ve been turning over in my mind.

She speaks of her family’s years in New York City, and even more the years at Crosswicks, their rambling summer home in a small Connecticut town where at times four generations of her family live under one roof. There is much about community, and the peculiar interrelationship of people in such a small village, such as being suspicious of newcomers but still turning out to help them when they are in need.

Her portrait of the U.S. in the 1960s—the time period of this memoir—sometimes distracted me, sending my mind off into my own memories of those years. Hearing how someone the age of my parents viewed the happenings of that turbulent time sent me back to my own memories, turning them into new patterns.

She doesn’t shy away from the big subjects, such as faith, marriage, family, what might constitute a meaningful life. Still, it is her thoughts on writing that most resonate for me.

I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the “superconscious” has already shown me in a story or poem. Facing this does help to eradicate do-it-yourself hubris from an artist’s attitude towards his painting or music or writing. My characters pull me, push me, take me further than I want to go, fling open doors to rooms I don’t want to enter, throw me out into interstellar space, and all this long before my mind is ready for it.

The title comes from her need to retreat sometimes to her “circle of quiet,” a particular place at Crosswicks. We all need such a place, one where we can be our true selves. If you want a rest from the trauma Olympics of many memoirs on the market, try these reflections from a writer whose work you may know very well.

Do you have a “circle of quiet,” a place that is peculiarly your own?

Pattern of Lies, by Charles Todd

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Bess Crawford, a nursing sister on the frontlines in France near the end of the Great War, returns on leave to England to find a different kind of war being waged. Stuck in Canterbury when the London train is cancelled and all the hotels full, she runs into a former patient, Maj. Mark Ashton, who invites her to stay with him and his parents at their home in nearby Cranbourne.

What she finds is that the tiny village has turned against the Ashtons, particularly John’s father Philip. The Ashton Powder Mill, once the largest employer around and a place where workers were treated particularly well, had blown up two years previously, an explosion followed by a devastating fire, killing over a hundred men.

The Army investigated, fearing sabotage, but declared it an unfortunate accident. Due to the war, the need for gunpowder was overwhelming, and the mill had been commandeered by the Army. Despite Philip’s warnings, the new masters had the mill working flat out to meet the demand, with extra shifts and new workers brought in.

Now the villagers have become convinced that Philip Ashton is responsible for the disaster. Bess is shocked by the retaliatory actions they have taken: tearing down walls, releasing animals, spitting at anyone associated with the Ashtons, even setting fire to their house.

Given the suddenness of the accusation and its wide spread, Bess comes to believe that someone is behind the rumors, someone angry with Philip Ashton or the Ashton family. Unfortunately, the only witness to the fire is a local man now serving at the front in France who refuses to request leave to come back and make a statement.

There is almost nothing more terrifying to me than this kind of hysteria. We see it today with the firehose of misinformation. We have seen it before: Lillian Hellman described it chillingly in The Children’s Hour and Arthur Miller in The Crucible. It is almost impossible to defend oneself as rumors spread.

This mystery, seventh in the Bess Crawford series, though the first one I’ve read, is absorbing. There are plenty of twists and turns, and plenty of clues. Best of all, we get Bess’s impressions of England and France during wartime. Her duties vary from working at the front itself, escorting patients to hospital in the backlines in an ambulance under fire, and caring for patients as they are shipped back to England.

The latter gives her plenty of opportunity to visit the Ashtons, as she must pass through Canterbury, and pursue her own investigation while offering support to the family. The other characters are memorable due to the nuance with which they are rendered. I especially liked that the authors (Charles Todd is the pseudonym for mother and son Caroline and Charles Todd) avoids the standard romantic subplot.

The time period increased my enjoyment of this book. I’ve long been fascinated by the Great War, aka WWI, which changed everything for the Western world. Empires ended, colonies gained freedom, global power shifted, and the irresponsible slaughter not only decimated populations and economies but destroyed the ideal that it was glorious to die for your country. As Wilfred Owen put it: If you could have experienced what he did in the trenches

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Do you read historical fiction? Do you have a favorite time period?

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

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The story opens with the infamous Nellie Coker, owner of a string of nightclubs in 1926 London, being released from Holloway Prison at dawn. Many of the toffs and high-ranking politicians who revel at her clubs and who conspired with her in evading police scrutiny are present, a bit bedraggled by their long night dancing and drinking, to celebrate Nellie’s release, along with “the usual riffraff and rubberneckers.”

Nellie immediately has to buckle down and defend her empire from several threats.

Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher, on loan to Bow Street to “root out corruption,” is one of those threats, though he is hampered by the distrust of his new colleagues, the distraction of a string of drownings of young girls, and his own ineffectual nature. He is unhappily married to a mentally ill woman; he’s not really sure why he married her except that he prevented her from jumping off a bridge.

With characteristic humor, Atkinson vividly depicts the London club scene of the time. The aftermath of the Great War is everywhere in this story, from wartime reminiscences of the doorman to the difference between men who had gone to war and those who had not. Even the reckless abandon of 1920s London is blamed on a reaction to the war.

The criminal elements are mostly played for laughs. This bumbling cast of villains reinforces Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil. Writers don’t come off much better. Frobisher’s articles requested by John Bull are never published because they are not sensational enough. Ramsey Coker wants to be a best-selling author, but is too lazy to actually write.

Atkinson has done her research on this period. However, this novel illustrates the danger of too much research. I found it an unsatisfying story of uninteresting characters.

It also illustrates the danger of using real people and their lives for a story. Real people the author only knows from reading about them don’t necessarily make for interesting characters. There’s too little detail, nothing that makes them stand out. Frobisher, “influenced” by real-life Superintendent Robert Fabian and Nellie Coker, based on the real “queen of Soho’s clubland” Kate Meyrick, never quite come to life in this story.

Nellie’s obnoxious brood seem like empty caricatures put in place for plot purposes. The two 14-year-old girls who run away to London are stock characters. There’s a prostitute with a heart of gold, two policemen on the take, a strict battleax running a hotel for women, and so on.

Only the third protagonist, fictional Gwendolen Kelling, a former librarian who has come to London in search of the two lost girls, steps off the page, displaying real emotion and unexpected competencies. A nurse during the war, she is more than equal to London’s recklessness.

The other danger of using real lives is that they rarely fit into the kind of narrative arc readers expect. Here, plot threads are abandoned without being resolved; story questions are not answered; important events are random happenings rather than growing organically out of the characters and the plot. True, a couple of threads and questions are dispatched, but too much is left unresolved for there to be a satisfactory ending.

I had to wonder why I should care about these characters and their lives when the author seemed to care so little that she would just abruptly abandon them.

Just like real life, you might say. True. And it is somewhat interesting as an experiment. Atkinson is not alone among authors questioning whether standard story structures adequately represent our lives in this world. I appreciate her willingness to tinker with the balance between reality and story. Still, it was too insubstantial a story to satisfy me.

Have you read an historical novel that includes real people as characters? What did you think of it?

A Spy Among Friends, by Ben Macintyre

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I thought I knew a lot about Kim Philby, the infamous Third Man of Cold War-era Britain. In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two of Philby’s friends from university, were exposed as Russian spies, but were tipped off in time to escape to the USSR. At the time, and for years afterward, there were rumors of a third spy, a mole in England’s security service.

Macintyre’s astonishing account of Philby’s life, how he operated as a spy, and especially how he continued to escape detection until 1963, shows me how much more there is to the story. With penetrating insight, voluminous research, and access to newly opened files, Macintyre has fashioned an absorbing nonfictional narrative that helps us understand the man himself and the milieu in which he operated.

The title refers to E. M. Forster’s famous statement: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Forster spoke for a certain segment of English society. A generation later, it is the key to Philby’s choices: He gave his first loyalty to his true friends, the four schoolmates who, together with him, became known as the Cambridge spies.

Many people believed themselves to be Philby’s friends; however, extracts from his writings show what he really thought of them, even as he pretended to value them. Philby beguiled everyone he met.

The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was ‘charm,’ that intoxicating, beguiling, and occasionally lethal English quality. Philby could inspire and convey affection with such ease that few ever noticed they were being charmed. Male and female, old and young, rich and poor, Kim enveloped them all. He looked out at the world with alert, gentle blue eyes from under an unruly forelock. His manners were exceptional: he was always the first to offer you a drink, to ask after your sick mother and remember your children’s names. He loved to laugh, and he loved to drink – and to listen, with deep sincerity and rapt curiosity.

He was “the right sort,” a member of the tribe of Eton-educated, cricket-loving Englishmen who populated MI6—and other institutions—in class-conscious England. For such a person there was no need to inquire into their references, their past, or even their competence.

Part of what makes this book so fascinating is Macintyre’s portrayal of the competing cultures in the nascent security organisations of the time: MI6’s old-boy bonhomie, MI5’s mistrust of their rival’s upper-class blindness, the newly-formed CIA’s respect for their predecessor.

No one was more taken in than Nicholas Elliot, also of MI6. Over the thirty years that the two men worked and socialised together, Elliot never suspected that everything he shared with Philby went straight to the KGB. When the evidence finally mounted to a point in 1963 where MI6 could no longer deny the truth, they sent Elliot to debrief the man he had considered his best friend.

Using the transcript of that conversation, Macintyre fashions a stunning conclusion to this book, decoding the seemingly innocuous dialogue. A lengthy afterword by John le Carré includes his own memories of Elliot and the other players.

Subtitled Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, this is a story that shows the human impact of these political intrigues. James Angleton, head of counter-intelligence for the CIA, also counted Philby as a friend. Macintyre’s description of the effect of Philby’s betrayal on Angleton stands in contrast to the Great Game, the name for the 19th century rivalry between Britain and Russia. Coincidentally, the term was popularised by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, also the source of Harold Adrian Russell Philby’s nickname.

By immersing us in the moves and countermoves of individuals during the Cold War, Macintyre helps us see how it can come to seem like a game, and how it can become an addiction for men like Philby, Elliot, and Angleton. Then he shows us how the game plays out. Brilliant.

What nonfiction books have you read that are as absorbing as a novel?