justin

This is a good story. In some ways, it was the perfect reading experience: I was carried away into the world of the story, caught up in the characters’ concerns. With some books (including most mysteries) the adrenaline kicks in and has me racing for the end, but with this book each scene drew me on, gently, ineluctably. There was just enough description to enable me to visualise everything without the descriptive passages overpowering the action. The characters seemed like people I knew, and the point of view moved between them in a natural way that did not disrupt the story. And it wasn’t until I finished the last page that I began to consider the larger implications of what I had read.

Harry Mason tells the story of his grandparents, Edith and Edward Mason, as they return to the U.S. in 1936 after many years of living in England. Edward fancies himself a great businessman, but his factory in Manchester, England, has been declining for many years and he is finally being forced to bring his wife and two sons, Sebastien and Simon (Harry’s father), home to take up residence in the family estate he has inherited from his aunt: some acres and a house which has been left empty and unattended for years and is now filled with mold and fallen plaster.

The Retreat is located on Maryland’s eastern shore, and one of the great joys of this book is seeing how this cosmopolitan, yet unsophisticated family reacts to their first encounter with life in such a remote backwater and how they adjust over the course of time to life among the farmers, white and black, and the inbred owners of neighboring estates. Anyone who has been to the eastern shore will appreciate these descriptions of the life and landscape in the days before the Bay Bridge brought hordes of tourists and retirees.

I initially picked up the book because the opening scenes take place on the Normandie, a pre-World War II luxury liner which has been part of my personal mythology since staying in the Normandie Hotel in Puerto Rico in the 1990s. Yet I quickly became absorbed in the concerns of all the characters as they try to figure out how best to live their lives and accommodate each other. I forgot about the Normandie until I finished the book and found myself wondering about the remnants of the past, what is new and what we carry forward.

A most satisfying read, I highly recommend this book and will be looking for others by this author.

Elizabeth Goudge is one of my favorite authors, though some of her children’s books are a bit too sweet for my taste. Of her adult books, my favorites are The Scent of Water and the Damerosehay books, with their lovely descriptions and gentle wisdom. Of her YA (young adult) books, this one is my favorite, although The Little White Horse runs a close second.

When their father departs for a new posting in India, the four Linnet children are left with their grandmother and her companion, Miss Bolt, two elderly women whose autocratic ways do not go over well with the children. Nan, Robert, Timothy, and Betsy, ranging in ages from twelve to six, are most distressed at being abandoned by their father, their mother having died five years earlier. After a particularly difficult set-to with Grandmama and the Thunderbolt, the children run away, scrambling over the garden wall and trudging toward the setting sun.

Tiring, they spy a pony and cart outside of a pub and hop in. The pony sets off for home, fetching up at a dark house in a mysterious village. Investigating, they find a tall man with an owl on his shoulder, who turns out to be their Uncle Ambrose, a retired schoolteacher-turned-parson who professes to loathe children and all their ways. Yet he allows them to stay with him. Also resident is Ezra, who has pointed ears and cooks delightful meals for the children, despite having been left to walk home from the pub when the children “borrowed” the pony and cart. Adventures ensue, as the children get caught up in the tensions and tragedies of the village and its surroundings.

Part of why I love this story is simply the immersion in another world. Set in 1912, the way of life described in this story has a nostalgic tint, but it is far from the Merrie England stereotype. There’s a bit of The Fatal Englishman as Sebastian Faulks called it: amateur explorers and archeologists wandering off on adventures and getting lost. There’s the darkness that comes from village isolation, set against the power of intelligence, learning and the ability to love. And, of course, everything is lit by the lovely glow of that “long afternoon” of the pre-war years.

Another part is the children themselves. Goudge does children very well. They are neither sarcastic nor smarmy, neither too good nor too bad, simply real children. I can’t imagine how Goudge knows or remembers so well how children think and what they care about, but she does so brilliantly. I also like the way she describes the food at meals with such relish, whether it’s the tiny cakes for tea or the great fry-ups for breakfast. Goudge’s descriptions of places, especially gardens and houses, are quite wonderful. Something about the description of Nan’s little parlor, furnished for her by Ambrose, has stayed with me over the years.

Finally, I like the way the magic bits are handled: lightly, deftly. You can chalk them up to a child’s imagination or, if you like, believe that a cat can concertina into a huge monster and a handful of bees lead you to safety. I love the gentle allusions to legends about bees and fairy folk. This book is charming, not in an empty soap-bubble way like Brideshead’s Sebastian, but in the old sense of casting a spell on the reader, enchanting me again every time I read it.

I enjoyed Penny’s earlier book Still Life which was the first book in this series. What I liked best were the descriptions of the setting, a small village just south of Montreal, and the people who live there, many of whom are artists of one sort or another. In that first book, the villagers’ relationships and jealousies and secrets must be disinterred and disentangled in order to discover why and how their elderly neighbor died while walking through the woods on Thanksgiving morning. I liked the detective, Inspector Gamache, but I found the young agent who comes along on the case, Yvette Nichol overdone and unrealistic. Elements of the ending took me by surprise, always a good thing.

Here, a woman who has recently moved to Three Pines is electrocuted in the middle of a curling match, and Inspector Gamache is called from Montreal to investigate. The dead woman, a self-centered monster who showered her husband, daughter, and lover with verbal abuse, has some mysterious tie with the village. She has named her decorating/self-help company and self-published book “Be Calm” which is also the name of a spitituality center in Three Pines run by a local woman.

While I enjoyed the bits of Canadiana and curling lore, I was a little disappointed by this book. The descriptions are wonderful and the plot suspenseful, but most of the characters are too simplistic, either perfect saints or evil monsters. Unfortunately, agent Yvette Nichol, whose portrayal marred the first book, is back and, despite some additional backstory, still more of a caricature than a person. Gamache himself is a bit too good to be true. Only the young couple who help him, Clara and Peter, and a few of the minor characters are allowed contradictions and complexity.

Penny is an excellent writer, but some aspects of the book are clumsily handled. For example, there are a number of threads left hanging at the end, which I find frustrating, since part of what I like about mysteries is the resolution. Also, we know little of Gamache’s inner life. He is trustworthy, brave, loyal, etc. but needs some inner conflict to come to life. Penny attempts to do that through the use of what I call a “Chinatown”, an off-hand reference early in the story that isn’t fully explained until the end, subconsciously pushing the reader to keep going (see my blog entry on Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro). Here, the references to the Arnot case, something in the past that has deeply affected Gamache, are meant to be just such a Chinatown, but instead of making me want to read on, they irritated me.

In trying to figure out why they didn’t work here, I thought back to Ian Rankin’s Rebus series and some of Laura Lippman’s books where the authors use this technique brilliantly. I think the difference is that Penny’s references are not off-hand. She might as well put them in the middle of a bulls-eye with arrows drawn toward them screaming, “This is important!” whereas Rankin in particular manages to drop his references inconspicuously in the middle of a conversation. The missing explanation seems to have no real importance, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I continue to puzzle over it.

Despite my complaints, I found this a good read. I hope that the series improves as Penny becomes more and more adept at her craft. It would not take much to make this series one of the very best around.

This is another lost book, not because the notebooks were hidden away after the death of the author as with Suite Francaise but because after its publication in 1981, it seems to have sunk into the obscurity that awaits most books. As a writer, I find it rather depressing the way most books are read for a season and then disappear, no longer available from the publisher. I also have my doubts about which books make up the canon, the ones that live on in literature courses, but that’s another discussion.

Although I read a lot and widely, I had never heard of this book until its reissue last year from New York Review. What a treasure! I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a book so much. Each time I picked it up, I started by going back a few chapters for the joy of reading them again before going on.

This is Ebenezer’s first-person narrative of his life on Guernsey, the island he left only once, to go to Jersey to play in a football match. It covers a period of great change in the life of the island, from the early days when everyone knew—and gossiped about—everyone else to modern days when Guernsey has become a tax haven and tourist destination. Ebenezer quarries granite with his father, watches his friends go off to fight in World War I (which ended just as he was about to be called up), suffers under the German Occupation during World War II and what he calls the English Occupation that follows.

What makes the book so great is Ebenezer’s voice. His sentences are calm and straightforward, but often with a wicked dig at the end. “My father was killed in the Boer War. He went off and joined the Irish Brigade and fought for the Boers.” “There was a mystery about Princess Zubeska. She had red hair like Eugene, but it was grey when she came to Guernsey.” I sometimes had to read such lines a couple of times over to be sure. Other times I just had to laugh out loud: “I thought they might make it up the day they went to Sark, since Raymond said Sark was heaven on earth; but it was rough coming back and she was seasick all over him.”

I usually loathe books written in dialect, but here it is handled so well that I loved the way it added to Ebenezer’s distinctive voice. It’s not overwhelming, but comes out sometimes in the syntax: “That’s why I have never left Guernsey, me.” Then, too, there are a few words and phrases in the Guernsey patois, a version of French, but never enough to be intrusive and always easy to understand from the context.

There is something I always find rather sad in a story—fictional or not—of an entire life, something about the early promises unfulfilled, the inevitable compromises with grief, the abilities lost or abandoned in old age. Yet my sadness here was tempered by an appreciation of this acerbic and entertaining personality, whose prejudices are balanced by his capacity for love and great friendship.

Edwards completed this, his only book shortly before his death in 1976. It was the first of a planned trilogy about life on Guernsey, and I can only mourn the unwritten books, as I do the last three books in Nemirovsky’s suite.

Several people recommended this wonderful book to me, for which I’m grateful. As most people know by now, the story behind this book about the German occupation of France during World War II is almost as interesting as the book itself. Nemirovsky, an established writer of Ukrainian origins living in France, wrote the two novellas making up Suite Francaise almost as the events depicted in them were unfolding. They are part of Nemirovsky’s projected five-book series about the war. Ironically, the third book was to be Captivity but Nemirovsky herself was arrested and sent to Auschwitz where she died, followed shortly by her husband. Her daughter preserved the notebooks containing these two novellas but did not read them until the late 1990s.

As a writer, I am mightily impressed with Nemirovsky’s ability to write about what was even then occurring, without the leisure for reflection and analysis. Her grasp of the larger issues stunned me, as did her detailed observations of people’s reactions to events and her recognition of what they said about France as a whole. And I can’t say enough about her evocative language, her use of dialogue, her ability to see into the hearts of so many different sorts of people.

For all I have read about both world wars, this is the first time I’ve read an account of what it was like for ordinary, middle-class folks when the Germans descended on Paris. “Storm in June” follows several families and individuals engulfed by the panic and chaos as they try to flee. Sometimes funny, sometimes sardonic, sometimes sweetly sympathetic, Nemirovsky allows us to experience their uncertainty as they struggle with the practical details of leaving town. Do you take the cat? Linens? Artworks? Where do you get gas for the car? Are the trains still running?

What I found most interesting was how long it took some people to understand the extent and ramifications of what was happening, like the mother who tells her children that as good Christians they should share their cookies and chocolates with other refugees until she realises that she cannot buy more because the stores are empty. I was also fascinated by how the panic affected the social structure and norms, what broke down and what remained.

“Dolce,” the second novella, takes place in a small rural town where some of the refugees have come to rest. Unlike the usual tales of the Resistance and collaborators, these extraordinarily realistic characters struggle to balance their patriotism and pride against the obvious humanity of the German soldiers who occupy the town. Throughout both novellas, Nemirovsky’s characters are minutely observed and insightfully depicted. One reviewer compared her to Flaubert in her realism which I think is true.

And it is the characters who drive her themes of greed and betrayal. The upper middle-class and aristocracy seem concerned only with themselves, like the bank manager who callously abandons two of his elderly employees whom he’d promised to drive out of Paris, simply because his mistress wants the car. At the same time, he demands that they meet him in Tours in two days or lose their jobs, without seeming to recognise that they have no way to get there other than walking. Or the rich aesthete who loads his car with his precious artifacts and, when he runs out of gas, tricks two young lovers in order to steal their gas. Yet Nemirovsky manages to balance the egotistical pettiness of her characters with humane sympathy for their limitations.

Some reviewers have complained that she did not address the issue of anti-semitism and the fate of the Jews, particularly since she herself was Jewish. Similarly, some reviewers complained about McEwan’s Saturday because he didn’t write about the anti-war march itself. However, I believe writers should be allowed to write what they want, what they are compelled to write. Even though I’m often guilty of criticising a book because it doesn’t tell the story I wanted or expected it to, I at least recognise that I’m the one at fault. I highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys having a slice of history come to life, or meeting unforgettable characters, or simply reveling in gorgeous language.

I had been reading some of Wendell Berry’s essays about his Kentucky farm, so was delighted when a friend loaned me this book of short stories. The stories center on Ptolemy Proudfoot, a farmer, a large man, the last of what was once a large clan of Proudfoots in and near the town of Port William. Details of farm life enrich these deceptively simple tales of Tol and his wife, Miss Minnie. Hard work is leavened by the social occasions that Tol loves: visits to town, neighbors dropping by the house, family gatherings, a harvest festival at the school.

The affectionate depictions of Tol’s eccentric neighbors and the unspoken ties that bind them together reminded me of Mohawk especially in the way they assumed a certain responsibility for each other. Just as the owner of the bar and grill in Russo’s book gave Wild Bill a job and watched out for him, just as Dallas’s friends continued to loan him money and tolerate his feckless way with a timeclock, so Tol and his friends watch out for each other.

In the novella from which the book takes its title, Tol is visited by a neighbor known as Nightlife who was prone to spells where he became confused and angry, even dangerous. Occasionally he was sent to the asylum “where they would file him down and reset his teeth.” On this day, Nightlife picks up Tol’s shotgun, says something about how a man might as well shoot himself, and walks off. Tol follows him, reluctant to confront him and be shot himself, but unwilling to just let the man go. Tol is eventually joined by other neighbors, and they follow the man through woods and fields for the entire day and night and into the next day. They didn’t have to. They could have gone home to their wives and their dinners and their neglected fields, but their sense of responsibility for their neighbor wouldn’t let them.

The long walk is enlivened by stories brought to mind by places they pass and people they encounter. Tol also likes to tell stories about his grandfather, as in “Turn Back the Bed” where the men at a church picnic beg him to tell the story of his grandfather, a chamberpot, and a Proudfoot family gathering long ago. The past is present in all of these tales, Tol’s constant awareness of those who worked these fields and lived in these houses lending a depth and perspective to the simplest everyday action.

Tolkien called it “shimmer”, this sense of looking at things and seeing the past like a shadow behind it, and another past beyond that, and another. He deliberately included it in The Hobbit and The Lord of Rings trilogy, with their references to half-remembered legends, ruins whose stories had been lost, great statues left from long-gone civilizations.

In one of his essays, “The Long-Legged House”, published in a collectin with the same name, Berry talks about this awareness of the past in his own life. The essay focuses on a cabin on the river built by Curran Matthews, his grandmother’s brother, and what it has meant to Berry throughout his life, from a teenager’s camp to the place where he took his wife after their wedding to a weekend get-away. Even though there is nothing left of it at the present but the chimney and well, some locust trees, and the little white flowers in the grass, Berry looking at it sees the shades of the past: his great-uncle building it, himself as a young man. He sees the sycamore warbler of the present, echoed by the phoebes that used to build nests under the eaves. He says that “. . . where most American writers—and even most Americans—of my time are displaced persons, I am a placed person.” He goes on to say that it is not so much that we can possess a place but that a place can possess us.

I understand this. It’s the way I feel about the camp in Plymouth. The first time I went there, I felt that I had discovered my own place, the place in the world where I belonged. It took a while for me to understand that instead, I belong to the place, as so many others have in the past and do today.

This is the first Russo book I’ve read and, as promised, it depicts life in small, failing New England mill town with such immediacy and accurancy that anyone who has ever lived in one will recognise the town and its people. By putting other names to these characters, they would become true portraits of people I’ve known: a daughter held in thrall to an over-controlling mother, a feckless man who doesn’t understand why none of his schemes succeeds, an overly honest man who is rejected by his co-workers yet is only too aware of his own failings, a too-smart young man who unnerves those who prefer the comfort of mediocrity in their fellows, a couple who—married to others—do not act on their feelings.

Yet Russo manages to depict these people in all their complexity, avoiding the easy stereotypes. I particularly liked the way he captured the subtle ties and dependencies between these people. There is something deeply human going on here, something that stands against the greed and selfishness that often seem to me to make up the foundation of human nature. Even Neolithic societies, it has been argued (see On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail), were structured as dominance hierarchies where those on top kept subordinates in line by random acts of violence. While this rule of terror seemed to occur only in the settlements (the hunter-gatherers being more egalitarian) it is still disconcerting to think that an amoral greed for power is so deeply engrained in us.

I’ve wandered a bit from the town of Mohawk, New York, but my point is that Russo brings out the curious way we tolerate each other’s failings and sometimes show a rare and remarkable generosity. It is unusual to find, outside of war stories, something that captures the companionships of men, the way they are with each other in times of boredom and times of stress. By placing them in an unremarkable backwater like Mohawk, Russo presents these characters’ ordinary interactions and highlights their moments of transcendent connection.

Some of the places, such as the bar and grill, are characters in themselves. The old hospital, which is in the process of being torn down, plays an important role in the story. Its emergency room was a place to see your neighbors on Saturday nights after the bars closed and victims of bar fights and domestic abuse began to trickle in. It is a fitting symbol for these people, all of whom have been damaged: some physically, such as Dan who is tied to a wheelchair after an auto accident and Wild Bill who has been left mentally deficient after a mysterious incident in his youth; some financially, such as Anne who gives up opportunity after opportunity to care for the parents with whom she cannot connect; and some emotionally, such as Dallas who cannot get past the death of the brother who was his ballast and keel.

The story unfolds naturally out of these characters—none of McEwan’s diaboli ex machina here—and brings their intertwined fates to a stunning climax. Russo does a great job of maintaining suspense by revealing some secrets and withholding others. The pacing here is excellent. There are several different story threads that in equal measure make up the pattern of the book. While this kind of tapestry approach to plotting certainly reinforces the sense of a varied community, I usually prefer novels with a single main narrative and main character, enriched with many subplots and minor characters. Still, I enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.

I’ve written before about McEwan’s books. I think he’s a brilliant writer, though I don’t much like his characters; they seem cold and impersonal to me. In this book, unfortunately, they also seemed completely unreal. I simply did not believe that such people existed, making the story an intellectual exercise rather than a world I could enter.

The action all takes place in London on a single day, a Saturday. Henry Perowne wakes early to see a burning plane heading into Heathrow, a sight which fans his post-9/11 fears. It is the day of a huge march to protest the Iraq War, but the march is simply an inconvenience for Perowne as he runs his errands, plays squash, and prepares for a family reunion dinner at his luxurious London home. However, the march is partially responsible for his being in a minor accident, a road rage encounter that drives the rest of the story.

Perowne is a busy, successful neurosurgeon who still has oodles of time to cook for his family and attend the activities of his fabulously talented, brilliant, successful and never surly adolescent and post-adolescent children. Through decades of marriage, he has never once desired any woman but his wife, a brilliant and successful lawyer, and they have lovely sex not once but twice on this particular day. You see the difficulty.

I understand that McEwan wanted this family to stand in for the privileged west, fattened on the world’s resources. He points out how we take luxuries such as grapes in winter and running hot water for granted, which of course is true. Yet, as one member of my book club remarked, the nails of the story's structure are too obvious. Some reviewers have noted that Perowne’s political views reflect those of McEwan himself expressed in various articles. Without arguing one way or the other about the politics of protest marches and the war in Iraq, I’ll just say that this book is a good example of the danger of setting out to write a political treatise in the form of a novel.

Where McEwan does succeed, in my opinion, is in capturing a certain mindset common today. There’s the compulsion to listen to news stories while not trusting their source. “He suspects he's becoming a dupe, the willing, febrile consumer of news fodder.” There’s the way people argue fiercely over such things as the war when they have no first-hand information on which to base their opinions. And of course there's the free-floating anxiety and the aggression that comes out in road rage, sports, and even casual conversation. I loved his notion that “A race of extraterrestrial grown-ups is needed to set right the general disorder, then put everyone to bed for an early night.”

However, I don’t think this mindset is the result of 9/11. It started long before. And I don’t see how the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon are all that different from other terrorist attacks—from a bomb in a London market, a plane brought down in Lockerbie, sarin gas in a subway in Tokyo, or a bomb on a Spanish train—except that they happened in the U.S. and on television. Therefore, for me at least, the basis of this story—that the world changed irrevocably and uniquely on that September morning—simply doesn't hold.

I have now read three books in Lawrence's series featuring Detective Sergeant Stella Mooney. The jacket of this one compared the series to Ian Rankin and Prime Suspect but aside from being a gritty police procedural, the comparison didn't seem particularly apt. True, Stella occasionally makes reference to the kind of mysogynism that Jane Tennison faced in Prime Suspect, but seems to enjoy unusual loyalty and deference from her boss and from the men who work for her. At one point in this book, her boss takes leave due to illness and his replacement starts off patronising Stella, though it is not clear (at least to me) that he does so because she is a woman; rather, he seems overeager to assert his authority.

In this book, DS Mooney is after a gruesome serial killer who seems to see himself as an avenger. At the same time, she is fending off ghosts from her past, both her professional life and her childhood in Harefield, one of the worst projects in the area for crime and drugs. Complicating Stella's personal life further is her friend John Delaney, a journalist burnt out from covering combat zones yet missing the adrenaline rush of action.

A person on one of my maillists recently commented that reading too many of any author's books one after the other can show up the author's weaknesses, so it was better to space them out and intersperse them with other books. John Banville said in an interview with Ben Ehrenreich that each of his books grows out of the one before it, that in a sense all of his books are voumes in a single book. I feel that way too, and prefer to read everything by an author at once, warts and all.

However, this method turned out to be not such a good idea with Lawrence. A steady diet of the hard-core violence in these books eventually turned even my stomach. I felt overwhelmed by the quick violence of project life, the odor of a body left too long, the way blood beads on a cut. A matter of personal taste, for sure, and it's true that recently I've stopped watching some of the tv dramas I used to enjoy: all those gruesome murders and eviscerated bodies don't make for a restful night.

I have always liked grittier end of the mystery genre, some of my favorites being Ian Rankin and Dennis Lehane. But it's not the violence I like about them. It's the masterful writing: complex characters who grow and change, vivid local color, themes whose unexpected crannies are explored with a light touch.

With this series, the short, choppy sentences and scenes prevent the author from delving into the levels of complexity found in, say, Rankin's books. Despite my revulsion at the gruesome details, I found much to like in this book. The pacing is good, and there are some wonderful descriptions of London, terse but evocative. The story sheds an interesting light on the nexus of tv news, war movies, and video games. I also liked the way the author plays with some of the noir conventions. But I think it will be a while before I read another of his books.

After The Untouchable I couldn't resist this thriller based on the activities of the Cambridge spies. DS Derek Smailes is assigned to investigate the death of a graduate student at Cambridge, found hanged in his rooms. Simon Bowles was a brilliant but somewhat unstable mathematics student who spent his spare time using math, logic, and extensive research to find solutions to popular conundrums such as who actually killed President Kennedy. At the time of his death, Simon was looking into the Cambridge spy ring.

The consensus seems to be that Simon commited suicide and Smailes is pressured from all sides to wrap up the case. However, there are some things that don't add up. Smailes continues talking to the tutors and porters at the college, reading Simon's files, and trying to reconstruct what actually happened.

Smailes is an interesting character. Amicably separated from his wife, he has settled into a furnished flat, its recliner and ugly sofa a relief after his wife's demands that he weigh in on home decorating decisions. He has a thing about the U.S. and likes to listen to Willy Nelson and wear cowboy boots when off-duty. In the course of the investigation we learn a lot about what makes him tick and how his past informs his present life.

I found it hard to believe this is a first novel. It is so assured. Cape handles the suspense well, doling out clues and red herrings at the right intervals, leting us discover the inner lives of characters who could so easily have become stereotypes. He factors in class distinctions and town-versus-gown tensions with deceptive ease.

Surely the most difficult problem with a novel like this is figuring out how to incorporate the background information about the Cambridge ring. As a writer, you don't want to bore the many people who already know a great deal about Philby et al. Nor do you want to toss in large undigested chunks of research. At the same time, you don't want to lose the readers for whom it's all new, so you have to say something about it.

I'm happy to report that Cape handles this challenge masterfully. Even coming off of Banville's book with it all fresh in my mind, I didn't find the exposition boring. We learn about the spy ring's history in pieces, at the same time as Smailes and filtered through his consciousness and understanding.

The shifting alliances and uncertain allegiances kept me on my toes. I caught some clues and missed some others. Altogether, a most enjoyable read.