fiction

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

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I must have been ten or eleven when I first read this novel of an eccentric English family living in a house attached to and using a corner of a partially ruined castle. I didn’t remember anything except that I’d loved it despite my initial disappointment that it wasn’t about King Arthur or magical doings—I’d come to it from The Once and Future King and somehow thought it was going to be similar.

Yet I only had to read the first sentence for the whole story to come flooding back to me, plus a precise memory of where I was when reading it. The voice of Cassandra, who tells the story, is that strong.

Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain and her family love their dilapidated home. It would be better, though, if they had some money for little things like, oh, having more candles so they can read at night, fixing the leaks in the roof, actually getting enough to eat, and paying the rent.

Her father, a writer, had a very successful book many years ago but hasn’t written since. Her stepmother, Topaz, is a model for whom there aren’t many work opportunities in the depths of the country and London is too expensive. Although a bit drifty, Topaz is even-tempered and has turned out to be adept at fashioning meals out of almost nothing. There’s a brother, Thomas, two years younger, and Stephen, a year older than Cassandra, the son of their maid who stayed on with the Mortmains after her death even though they can’t pay him.

Of her older sister, Cassandra says: “Although I am rather used to her I know she is a beauty. She is nearly twenty-one and very bitter with life.”

See what I mean about the voice? Wanting to be a writer, Cassandra has decided to keep a journal, the book we are reading. She intersperses her record of the oddities of their daily life with her own quite original thoughts and interpretations. I say original, but I remember reading them and thinking Oh yes, that’s EXACTLY the way I feel. And she’s hilarious, sometimes without meaning to be.

I was too young then to recognise the inciting incident, the happening that upends their odd but stable lives. On a rainy night, while Cassandra is taking a bath in front of the kitchen fire, a young man knocks at the door and enters. He and his brother are moving into nearby Scoatney Hall, empty since the death of their uncle who is also the landlord for the Mortmains’ home. The sisters actually joke about Austen’s novel.

In trying to decide what most delights me in this story, I have to give credit to the setting: the peculiar house/castle with its moat and nearby ancient tower. I love the room over the gate where Father retires to “write” every day, but actually reads mystery novels. And Cassandra’s descriptions of their life at home, their jaunts in the English countryside, etc. are quite distinctive. Here’s a bit from her first visit to Scoatney Hall:

We left our wraps in the hall—Topaz had lent us things to save us the shame of wearing our winter coats. There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.

I love their hijinks. Not just the imaginative way they live—calling the room between the girls’ room and the adults’ bedroom the “buffer state”, using a dressmaker’s dummy as a confidante and mentor—but the accidental mischief they fall into, like Rose being mistaken for a bear.

Most of all, though, it’s Cassandra’s storytelling, her humor, her peculiar turns of phrase, her odd outlook. Every page holds delightful surprises. If you’ve never read this book, you have a treat in store for you. If you have, try reading it again.

Have you reread a book that you loved when young? Was it as good as you remembered?

The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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I remember this book from my childhood. It was on a top shelf in the study, a small room lined with bookcases. Aside from the many-volumed encyclopedia and my grandfather’s law books, most of the shelves were filled with my father’s medical books. We children would pull them down when we wanted to scare ourselves and each other with the photos of rare diseases. So when I saw this book with the title in large letters on the spine, above my reach, I assumed it was another medical book, describing some form of mental disability.

I must have been curious, though, because it is the only title I remember from those walls.

Although I read a lot, I’ve only recently begun to catch up with the classic Russian authors. The Idiot begins with young Prince Muishkin, 26 or 27 years old, traveling by train to St. Petersburg from Switzerland where he’d spent several years being treated for severe epilepsy. He meets two men: Parfen Rogojin, a pale man of about the same age with fiery eyes, and Lebedeff, a social-climbing clerk of about 40.

The two are amused by the prince, who is inappropriately dressed for the cold and who answers their questions with a naive honesty and openness that makes them think him simple-minded. The prince reveals that he has no other plan but to look up a distant relative, Mrs. General Epanchin (Elizabetha Prokofievna). The two take him in hand.

I won’t try to summarise the complicated plot and large cast, but the heart of the book is the prince, whose artless innocence wins over everyone he meets. Dostoevsky said that he wanted to write a novel about a completely good and moral man. Of course, like others the prince has been compared to since, such as Don Quixote and Jesus himself, he brings trouble on himself and those around him. Most people, including the prince himself, call him an idiot, thinking his innocence and epilepsy symptoms of a feeble brain. Gradually, though, they come to appreciate his wisdom and deep insight into those around him.

The prince falls in love with two women who—to their own surprise—both love him back: Nastasia Philipovna, a woman who has been used as a concubine by a man who adopted her as his ward and whom Rogojin also loves, and Aglaya, the youngest and most beloved Epanchin daughter. As A.S. Byatt astutely observes in her review of a recent translation:

The women think they are in a story about seduction, rape, proposals, money and marriage, like most novels in the realm of the passions and economic forces. The prince is in some absolute moral world in which he can instinctively gauge who is being cruel to whom, who is in need and who is tormenting or tormented, without having in him any genuine sexual response of his own to help him to judge his own effect on people.

I found this novel compelling, though I certainly understand the complaints of critics who find the plot contrived and the characters flat. What most impressed and unsettled me was Dostoevsky’s technique of presenting some incident or fact as though we already know all about it, whereas in fact he only explains it some pages or chapters later. At first I was annoyed, but then I realised this was how the prince must feel, adrift in a world where everyone seems to know the rules except him. At the same time, he is utterly sure of his own understanding.

As writers, we are taught that to make characters seem real they must be neither entirely good nor entirely bad, but some mixture. Dostoevsky’s challenge here is to make the purely good prince seem real. He makes the other characters complex enough, like Mrs. General Epanchin berating those whom she most cares for and worries about, or Rogojin who is alternately selfless and grasping.

I think Dostoevsky succeeds in making the prince real. Perhaps that is because I have known a few such people, not perfect certainly, but so innocently good that your heart aches for them, knowing the hurts they will encounter. I’m glad I waited to read this novel. I don’t think I would have enjoyed it so much if as a child I had pulled it down from that top shelf.

What Russian classic have you read that impressed you?

The Japanese Lover, by Isabel Allende

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Allende’s new novel takes place primarily in Lark House, a fictional nursing home in California, where strong-willed Alma Belasco has established herself. She’s left the family mansion where she has lived ever since being sent out of Poland at the beginning of World War II, first with her aunt and uncle and then with her husband. Now she has entrusted it along with her philanthropic organisation to her bewildered son and daughter-in-law, who cannot fathom why a healthy woman would abandon her privileged life in favor of a modest room in a nursing home.

Irina Bazili, a care worker at Lark House, catches Alma’s eye and allows Alma to persuade her to work part-time as her personal assistant. However much she enjoys working with Alma and the other residents, Irina refuses to share anything of her own past or her private life, and resists the overtures of Alma’s grandson Stephen. Eventually, though, Irina and Stephen become intrigued by Alma’s past and the mysterious letters and bouquets that arrive for her and decide to find out the truth.

Along with the two young people we explore Alma’s past and her connection with Ichimei Fukuda, a calm and sensitive Japanese gardener who worked at her aunt and uncle‘s estate. Alma’s personal journey, as an artist and as a woman, takes place within the framework of late 20th century events, such as the French Resistance, the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war, and the AIDS epidemic.

I found the book a pleasant read, though rather flat, an opinion echoed by several members of my book club. What made it seem superficial was the lack of dramatic scenes; the story was almost entirely told as a narrative. One person who loved it had listened to an audio version, which would have been particularly appropriate for this story. Others found it a soothing, easy read, something sweet just before bed.

Not too sweet, though. The stories of the two couples—Alma and Ichimei, Irina and Stephen—are well-balanced and play against each other. Past losses and traumas come to light, shading the romantic and nostalgic elements.

It seemed to me that we skipped over large dramas, such as the war and the internment camps, too lightly. Having recently read Gretel Ehrlich’s Heart Mountain which beautifully explored the experience within and without such a camp, I felt let down by the brief nod to the experience.

Some of us had trouble keeping the characters straight. Although pleased to see an elderly woman as the protagonist and portrayed realistically, I had little interest in the characters. I was most curious about Ichimei’s wife, but she has only a miniscule role.

One person was offended by the romantic depiction of infidelity, calling Alma and Ichimei’s bond merely a fairy tale to mask what was only a sexual relationship. I confess I was a little put off by the infidelity being presented as a purely gorgeous and wonderful gift (hence my interest in the betrayed wife), but joined with the rest of us in appreciating the unusual love story. I wondered how many of my friends had ever felt a profound connection—some even referred to Alma and Ichimei’s bond as mystical—to someone aside from their spousesbut was afraid to ask. I have. I would not call such a bond a fairy tale, but I am also aware of the costs.

I did not think my book club would have much to talk about with this book, but was delighted to find that I was wrong.

However, our meeting was not the place for the deeper discussion that could have followed. I found myself wanting to ask questions like: What would you do if your spouse had this kind of deep connection with someone else? Would you insist that they never see the person again? Or would you be happy for them as long as it didn’t interfere with your own marriage? Would you rather not know?

Have you read any of Isabel Allende’s books? Which one is your favorite?

The Dogs of Riga, by Henning Mankell

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I came to the corporate world from teaching where even the most cynical and disillusioned co-worker started from a place of caring about the children. When I started working in the corporate world, however, I quickly realised that there were two sorts of people there: those who cared only about getting ahead and those who cared about the work itself. Inspector Kurt Wallander is one of the latter.

Here, Wallander investigates the case of two dead men washed ashore in a life raft. Apparently in their mid-30s, dressed in expensive clothes with their arms wrapped around each other, both men have been shot through the heart. The previous day, one of Wallander’s younger colleagues had taken an anonymous call that a raft with two dead bodies would be washing ashore. At the time, Wallander decided to alert the coast guards and then wait and see what happened.

Wallander is not averse to waiting. He can act and does, but he takes a measured and intelligent approach to his job. Unfortunately for him, the ramifications of the case take him out of his comfort zone, out of his city and even out of his country. He must take action in an atmosphere of uncertainty, guesswork, and peril for both himself and others.

Once it is determined that the two men probably came from Latvia, Wallander is relieved to turn over the investigation to his Latvian counterpart, Major Liepa, whom he recognises as a policeman after his own heart. When the two talk late into the night over a bottle of whiskey, Liepa explains that he is a man of faith, though he does not belong to a religion. He cares about “the fight for survival”, which to him includes “the fight for freedom and independence.”

Another murder drags Wallander back into the case and sends him to Latvia, where he has to negotiate places, people and power structures that are foreign to him.

This is the third book in the Wallander series, first published in Sweden in 1992. The date is significant because, as Mankell describes in his Afterword, “Just a few months after this book was finished, in the spring of 1991, the coup took place in the Soviet Union—the key incident that accelerated declarations of independence in the Baltic countries.”

While the story is intricately plotted, with many unexpected twists and turns, the real joy of the book for me is Wallander as a character. We see much of his life outside of work: oppressed by the intense cold, navigating a difficult relationship with his elderly father, thinking of his daughter Linda who is away at college, and often missing his friend and mentor Rydberg who has died of cancer only a month previously.

Such scenes, which seem irrelevant to the puzzle of the two men in the life raft, help us with the puzzle that is Wallander himself. And each scene echoes through the story, adding context and color to Wallander’s thoughts and choices and actions.

I love the realism of this portrayal. Wallander gets discouraged; he needs to stop and rest sometimes or eat or use the washroom. He questions himself, at one point describing himself as “a Swedish police officer in early middle age, one who has completely lost his sense of judgment and gone out of his mind.”

But he goes on. Offered opportunities to leave and return to his safe desk in Ystad, Wallander is tempted but plows ahead, driven by the core of integrity that I most appreciate in those around me and in the protagonists with whom I choose to spend my time. These are my heroes, whether sitting at a desk near me or in the pages of a book: however flawed, they labor for something larger than themselves.

Who are some memorable characters from novels you’ve read?

The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

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Judging by reader reviews, this is a book you love or hate. It is the story of a circus, one that “arrives without warning” and whose tents and even the ground around them are black and white. No other color intrudes.

I should have been warned right there.

The point of view is third-person omniscient, meaning that the story is told from the perspective of a distant and unnamed consciousness who knows everything that goes on in people’s hearts. Thus we enter the minds of no less than fifteen characters.

The two main characters are Celia and Marco, whom we first meet as small children who have come under the care of two magicians. These two father figures, whom we later discover are fantastically ancient, profoundly disagree about the place of magic in the world and long ago devised a competition to prove their respective points. In this round, Celia and Marco will be their proxies and the circus their gameboard.

After a long introductory section devoted mostly to their training, Celia and Marco begin devising magical attractions for the circus, aware that they are competing (though initially Celia does not know with whom), but not what the stakes are. We know that they couldn’t be higher. Of course, the two young people fall in love, just to make things harder.

There is much that I loved about this book. The circus attractions are astoundingly creative: a pool of tears where you drop in a stone to leave your grief behind, a cloud maze where you climb “a series of platforms swooping in odd, diaphanous shapes, quite similar to clouds” and jump from them without injury. And each contains an element of emotional truth about our humanity, reminding me of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. For example, another character, Widget, creates a tent of bedtime stories, full of tables and shelves stocked with all sizes and sorts of bottles. When you uncork one you are enveloped by a mixtures of scents:

The scent that wafts from it is the unmistakable smell of the ocean, a bright summer day at the seashore. He can hear the sound of waves crashing against the sand, the cry of a seagull. There is something mysterious as well, something fantastical. The flag of a pirate ship on the far horizon, a mermaid’s tail flipping out of sight behind a wave. The scent and the feeling are adventurous and exhilarating, with the salty tinge of a sea breeze.

The magic is presented so matter-of-factly that it’s easy to accept, even as another part of your mind suggests that, to a boy, simply the smell of the ocean can evoke memories of Peter Pan.

Another thing that I enjoyed, though it took until almost the end of the book for me to appreciate it, is Morgenstern’s intricate plotting. She weaves together the stories of many characters and multiple timelines, inserting clues whose significance only becomes clear much later.

There is also much that I hated about this book. Those multiple timelines had me forever flipping back four or five chapters to understand how they fit together. Just one of these timelines had anything distinctive, a character named Bailey who only shows up in the most distantly future timeline. The others had the same characters doing similar things but back and forth in different years. Looking back, I can see how this way of organising the material enabled Morgenstern to unfold her story in an important way, but as I was reading, it was confusing and downright annoying.

The pace is mostly excruciatingly slow, especially in the beginning. I was quite bored and came close to giving up.

Worse, the characters are flat. They are good or bad. Period. Marco and Celia have no inner life, no goal other than the game imposed on them by the two evil magicians. Marco and Celia are so unrealistic as to be not even human—seriously, what teen would put up with the abusive training regimes their mentors devised for them? None of the other characters have much more to them, though at least they have interesting quirks. Only Bailey, whom we get little of till the end, has any inner life.

My opinion shifts, though, when I consider the book through the filter of Angela Carter’s definition of a tale: something not reflecting everyday experience, drawing on fairy tales and the unconscious rather than placing the reader in the experience of realistic characters. We don’t expect Hansel and Gretel to give dramatic monologues about their internal conflict. In fact, I see Carter’s influence here, though not acknowledged beyond a book written by a character mentioned once with the title of Carter’s novel, Nights at the Circus. I also see the influence of Ray Bradbury’s stories of dark circuses and carnivals.

As a novel, I would say this book deserves all the one- and two-star reviews it has gotten on Goodreads. As a tale, though, it earns the equally many four- and five-star reviews. Although a bit slow, it makes a fine tale. And you have the added delight of the imaginative attractions, whose descriptions are like gems scattered through the story.

Have you read a story that you consider more of a tale than a novel?

And When She Was Good, by Laura Lippman

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While in line at Starbucks, small businesswoman and single parent Heloise Lewis learns of the apparent suicide of the so-called “suburban madam”. She hears the woman behind her patronisingly mocking the dead woman’s mental health and—in an action that might seem odd to anyone not from Baltimore—turns to confront her. Heloise defends the dead woman, arguing that prostitution is a victimless crime and, further, that as a person the woman deserves more respect than to have her entire life summed up in two words. She was “‘Someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s mother.’” Like Heloise herself.

This 2012 stand-alone from the popular author draws us irresistibly into Heloise’s life, a life she’s fabricated out of her damaged past to protect herself, her son, and her employees. Chapters alternate between Heloise’s history and the present where her carefully constructed life is under siege from an increasing number of threats.

Lippman deals out these threats with care. She follows up the surprise of Heloise’s profession with an account of the moment when as a child, then called Helen, her father first turns on her the anger and fists previously reserved for Helen’s mother. Then in the present, Heloise suffers the small betrayal of one of her oldest and favorite clients asking for someone new on his next visit.

By this time it was hard for me not to identify with Heloise and feel so firmly on her side that I could not abandon her when a worse threat is revealed: the possibility that her son’s father, a gangster and murderer, might be released from prison. I could not distance myself, thinking that such a thing would never happen to me. I could understand only too well how I might have gone down that path.

As K.M. Wieland describes in her blog for writers, it is a character’s backstory (or history) that makes a reader identify with her. As Lisa Cron says, backstory is “what gives meaning to everything that is happening up there on the surface” of the story. The trick, of course, is to weave it in carefully so it doesn’t overwhelm the story. With the parallel stories of Heloise’s past and present, Lippman doubles the difficulty. The difference in names–Helen and Heloise–helps keep the reader oriented between the two stories.

There are more betrayals, large and small, as Heloise struggles to save her life and the lives of her sons and colleagues. For me, the great joy of this book, aside from its powerful momentum, is the way Lippman details the inner workings of Heloise’s business. She’s thought through even minor details such as Heloise providing bracelets with GPS chips for her employees. When they leave her employ, they can have the chip removed and keep the bangle as a souvenir.

Even better is the way Lippman presents Heloise’s approach to running her business. It reminded me of Stringer Bell taking economics classes to better manage drug kingpin Avon Barksdale’s business in The Wire. It only makes sense, of course. A business is a business. Yet it keeps the reader identifying with Heloise even as we venture into less familiar territory.

As always with a Lippman novel, even as I’m racing to the end to find out what happens, I’m aware as a writer of bits of information falling into place, even those that seemed random or extraneous. I resisted this book for a long time because I so loathed the misogyny of the Philip Roth novel that the title pays tribute to that I not only threw it out but also tore it up first so no one else would suffer from its poison. However, I’m happy to recommend Lippman’s book as a supremely satisfying read.

Have you read any of Laura Lippman’s books? Which one is your favorite?

Salem’s Cipher, by Jess Lourey

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While the town of Salem, Massachusetts does make an appearance in this mystery/suspense novel, the title refers to Salem Wiley, a young woman whose deliberately uneventful existence in Minneapolis is torn apart by a phone call. She is a genius at cryptography and produced ground-breaking research for her PhD thesis, but her life is severely limited by a form of agoraphobia. The call from her best friend, Bel Odegaard, changes everything.

Police have informed Bel that her mother’s apartment has been broken into, a neighbor and her dog left in a pool of blood, and Grace–Bel’s mother–gone missing. When the two young women arrive, they discover that Salem’s mother was at the apartment as well, something we know from the prologue, and both Grace and Vida are missing, one of them probably dead.

Despite FBI Agent Stone’s warning that they too may be targets, Salem and Bel set out to follow the clue left for them by Vida, hoping to rescue their mothers. Or revenge them. As this tense, suspenseful novel tears along, the two women uncover a conspiracy going back hundreds of years. Each clue involves some kind of code, which Salem must decipher–and fast if they are to help their mothers. Factor in unforgettable characters they encounter, Emily Dickenson’s home and poetry, and an election about to produce the first female president of the U.S. and you have a story that works on several levels.

Lourey also works in references to scientific contributions by women, without slowing the breakneck speed of the story. She does an amazing job of capturing and conveying the emotions of the characters, especially the fraught mother-daughter relationships.

There are a few continuity problems that another editorial pass might have caught. There are also a couple of what Ray Rhamey calls “information questions” where information well known to the point-of-view character is teased yet deliberately withheld from the reader, presumably to create suspense. Mystery readers usually want to solve the puzzle along with the protagonist, so such tricks feel as though the author isn’t playing fair.

And it’s unnecessary, because Lourey is brilliant at ratcheting up the suspense. Every page has multiple instances of what Donald Maass calls “micro-tension” . A new and stunning bit of information or insight, a panicked physical reaction (“frantic movements”), even the use of especially active adjectives and verbs (“The . . . plane pitched and dropped, yanking Salem out of her light sleep.”) all keep the characters’ emotions in conflict and the reader turning the pages.

If you like to unravel a conspiracy or a good puzzle, if you long for a novel with engaging characters and a little history and literature thrown in, then hop on this rocket of a story.

Have you read a good mystery/suspense novel lately?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Bachman

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My first reaction to this bestselling debut novel was that it was a pleasant read, but not particularly substantial. Aside the characters’ ages and the book’s length, I thought it read like a book for ten- to twelve-year-olds. I was surprised my book club had chosen it and afraid we’d have nothing to talk about when we met.

I was wrong.

We had quite a discussion about the subtlety with which Backman unfolded his characters and how they might reflect Swedish society. Although a couple of us complained about the overly cute chapter titles, we all enjoyed reading this story of a grumpy middle-aged man who has just about had it.

Although Ove is only 59, he comes across as much older. Recently laid off, he continues his engraved-in-stone routines, such as inspecting the neighborhood every morning to make sure everyone is following the rules, and fills in the empty hours with trying to kill himself. He complains about everything, from a neighbor’s dog relieving itself on his paving stones to the way computers and espresso machines are destroying peoples’ minds.

Needless to say, I identified with him. Not about dogs or computers or espresso machines, but I’ve gotten more and more grumpy about other trends, like increasingly reckless drivers on my local streets or—well, I’ll save the specifics. And I’m completely with Ove on the dire lack of practical skills among most people today. Since home ec and shop classes were done away with, too many people don’t know how to cook a meal, hem a skirt, use a stick shift, or rewire a light.

Don’t get me started.

Things start to change for Ove when a young family moves into the neighborhood and refuse to be put off by him. A scrappy feral cat adopts him in spite of his efforts to drive it off. Another neighbor asks him to bleed her radiators, and word gets out about his competence with tools.

Backman gradually fills us in on Ove’s background, the influence of his father, what he learned about work, meeting and wooing his wife. It doesn’t feel like a tease, yet the careful parsing out of details takes the reader deeper and deeper into this one man’s character, making it impossible not to care about him.

One man, but he’s also an aspect of us all. Not the grumpiness, necessarily, but the desire for a good life, the attempt to control what can be controlled, the difficult balance between solitude and society.

I still think a ten-year-old could read this and get something out of it, yet there is much here for an adult to ponder as well.

Have you changed your mind about a book you’ve read, perhaps after you finished it or as a result of discussing it with others?

Burning Your Boats, by Angela Carter

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Somehow, in all my reading, I only recently stumbled across this author. Carter was a British author who died in 1992, only fifty-two years old, and known for her wildly inventive and imaginative work. In addition to the short stories collected in this volume, she wrote novels, poetry, children’s books, plays and nonfiction. I know! How could I have missed her?

I love these stories. Actually she calls them tales, saying, “The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience.” Thus she draws on images from dreams and legends, from fairy tales and the unconscious. The tale “retains a singular moral function—that of provoking unease.”

While, yes, these tales do provoke unease, they also overwhelm with audacity and rich allusions and tangled passion. She layers in the descriptions and emotions until you feel as though the whole thing is going to explode—and then she reels you back with a coolly humorous detail or sarcastic observation. You may be reading along, buried in a forest, and only gradually understand that you are in a bizarre version of Briar Rose where the sleeping maiden is actually a vampire. Or is it Jack and the Beanstalk? Maybe they are actually the same story.

Within all the fun and games lurk shadows, ones we can’t help but find resonances of in our own lives. Sex and power and passivity shift in surprising ways in these stories. What happens when the girl with the red scarf finds a wolf has eaten her grandmother, but she only laughs when he threatens to eat her? Who emerges triumphant when a wild child who’s grown up with the wolves is returned to her family? What did the “stern and square” four-year-old Lizzie Borden learn when she ran off to see the circus tiger, who is obedient until he is not?

Some tales go directly for society’s jugular. One such is “Our Lady of the Massacre”, written in the lush voice of a Lancashire orphan, transported to the New World for stealing where she ends up with an Iroquois tribe. Another is “The Bloody Chamber”, a richly imagined Victorian version of Bluebeard, where the power struggle between man and woman reaches a surprising resolution.

As Salman Rushdie says in his Introduction: “She opens an old story for us, like an egg, and finds the new story, the now-story we want to hear, within.”

My two favorites stories are “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream”, narrated by a Puck even more irreverent than Shakespeare’s creature, and “The Erl-King”, a passionate retelling of the classic tale that begins—against modern story-telling advice—with a long descriptive passage that immerses the reader in the haunted atmosphere of the autumn woods, woods that

. . . enclose and then enclose again, like a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another; the intimate perspectives of the wood changed endlessly around the interloper, the imaginary traveller walking towards an invented distance that perpetually receded before me. It is easy to lose yourself in these woods.

Here is another one of her subtle, rule-breaking techniques: changing the point of view without warning. She sometimes goes from first- into third-person or vice versa, leaving me unsettled and wondering what I’d missed.

In his essay on Carter in Children of Silence, Michael Wood suggests that among her exuberant and often hilarious imaginings, Carter is luring us into considering other possible ways of being in the world. She isn’t recommending them per se but rather making a passage for them, as a bullfighter creates a space for the bull to pass him.

He says, “Difference is Carter’s great theme. We can know other creatures, including humans, but only if we know their difference.” He goes on to talk about how she so often uses beasts in her fiction, beasts being “absolutely other”. But they are not “beyond transformation.” Nor are we, as the many tales here of people turning into beasts and beasts into humans suggest. Even though there are plenty of evil deeds perpetrated by both humans and beasts, Wood concludes that “there are no monsters, there is only difference.”

I cannot think of a theme more relevant to our world today.

Have you discovered a new author lately?

The Edge of Heaven, by Marita Golden

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It’s been a few years since I read this novel by the incredible Marita Golden. In her work she consistently takes on issues so delicate that most are afraid to discuss them at all. Golden approaches them with intelligence and humanity, forcing us to envision and inhabit lives that may be different from our own. To me this is what make literature one of the highest callings: that it nurtures our empathy.

The story opens with twenty-year-old Teresa Singletary and her mother, Lena, facing a major turning point in their lives: Lena is being released from prison.

As Teresa’s grandmother (and Lena’s mother) Ma Adele says, “‘She’ll need you to love her, love her to the bone.’” But Lena isn’t at all sure she’s ready to do that. She bitterly resents the losses that her mother’s actions caused and misses the father who left them shortly before events spun out of control. Ryland has been too absorbed in his own grief to be much of a father to Teresa, leaving her to Ma Adele’s steadfast care.

All of these characters have a turn, as the story moves between Teresa’s first-person point of view and the third-person point of view of the others, particularly Lena. Their actions and memories balance Teresa’s and add context and depth.

Through this “chorus of voices” as Golden describes it in the Reader’s Guide, the story conveys the terrible damage not just to the person imprisoned, but also to her or his family. This theme is what brought me back to this book, now when it seems as though our society may finally be ready to confront the massive racial inequality in the U.S. prison system.

I’ve learned so much from Marita Golden’s workshops. Her skill is evident on every page. Look at how Ma Adele is introduced. About to leave for work, Teresa stops to see her grandmother, entering a bedroom full of plants and flowers. “Some days I heard her behind her door conversing with the plants. She had names the cactus Butch and the azaleas that hung from the ceiling Aretha.” From this we get a picture of Ma Adele as nurturing and having a sense of humor.

Further we find that she is still in bed reading the newspaper, signaling an active intellectual involvement in the world. “The TV remote control, a paperback mystery, an aged, tattered leather phone book, knitting needles, a ball of yarn, and a stack of bills littered my grandmother’s bed.” We are reminded that Ma Adele is perhaps tired, spending much of her time in bed, a woman asked in her old age to raise another child.

Among the litter on the bed is a stack of letters from Lena. Teresa says, “Each time I looked at my grandmother’s face I saw the shadow and the promise of my mother and myself.” By now we know how complicated her emotions are about this seemingly commonplace observation.

This is just one example. The story takes us deep into the history of these individuals and their experience as a family. While the journey is sometimes dark and the human cost is huge, it is in the end a story of love’s possibilities.

I hope with all my heart that we can learn to live inside the lives of others and, seeing the world as they do, make better choices. Stories such as these help us get there.

What novel have you read that illuminated a life different from your own?