fiction

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?

Lady Susan, by Jane Austen

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I recently saw the film Love and Affection, which is not based on Austen’s novel of that name, but rather on her epistolary novel Lady Susan. The film seemed odd to me and a bit boring, aside from some very broad humor, so I immediately went home and read the novel for the first time.

As so often happens, I wish I’d read it before seeing the film. The story begins with the recently widowed Lady Susan and her daughter Frederica leaving Langford, where they had been visiting the Manwarings. Lady Susan sends Frederica off to school and goes on an extended visit to her brother, Charles, at Churchill. We learn rather quickly that Lady Susan not only has been receiving Lord Manwaring’s “attentions”, but has also detached the wealthy Sir James Martin from Miss Manwaring and persuaded him to propose to Frederica. Frederica, “born to be the torment of my life” as Lady Susan says, violently rejects the proposal.

So we have a fairly standard gothic plot of a heroine being forced into an unwelcome marriage, except here it is by her mother rather than the usual father/uncle/guardian. Also unusual is that Frederica is not the protagonist of the story; we only hear from her once in the novel.

In the film, Lady Susan is presented as being deliberately amoral, fully aware and proud of her ability to twist events and actions to pretend that she is the one behaving properly. She comes off as a proper villainess, like Madame de Merteuil in LaClos’s Dangerous Liaisons, published in 1782 and immediately translated into English and widely read.

Yet, in the novel, this wickedness is not so obvious. The most interesting justifications come in her letters to her friend, Alicia Johnson, with whom one would think she would be more open. Is Lady Susan deceiving herself as well as her friend when she presents herself as a martyr trying only to do what is best for everyone? I have certainly known individuals with an immense capacity for self-deception. And Lady Susan, as a widow with a grown daughter and no money, is in a vulnerable position in a world that offers no hope for survival in such a situation except relying on the kindness of friends and family.

In her biography of Jane Austen, Carol Shields says of this book:

The novel, never published during her lifetime, is her strangest and most unsettling literary offering and seems to have been unpopular with her family and friends. It is charmless. And very nearly pointless . . . [Lady Susan] shows not the slightest degree of shame or self-awareness as a reader might have expected by the novel’s end, and Jane Austen does not mete out to her what would be an appropriate punishment. It may be that Austen half admired her creation’s mixture of cunning and sexual bravura; Lady Susan was at least capable of exercising power—even though this force was chiefly directed at breaking up homes and managing her daughter’s misery.

Austen scholar Ellen Moody offers a different view:

The real problem in the novel is there are no good choices. . . There is a quiet desperation here, a disjunction between the stereotype she [Austen] found in her culture and what she wanted to say . . . My suggestion was it’s a radical inverted protest novel. Austen is getting away with protesting her own and other women’s situations through presenting a heroine all will detest.

I appreciate the ambiguity of the novel over the shallowness of the film. As Ellen Moody points out, “If you read Lady Susan as tongue-in-cheek, and . . . think that Lady Susan speaks ceaselessly as a conscious hypocrite and never believes a word she says about her emotions, she becomes a wild caricature. It seems improbable to me – you could not find any depth in the novel then.” Instead, you can “read Lady Susan’s letters as partly self-righteous, at times fooling herself (as people do), really half-believing herself a misunderstood person trying her best to survive and dealing with a society indifferent to her, and only facing up to her hypocrisy when forced to.”

Shields dates the novel from around 1795, but Moody makes a good case for it being set in 1804-5, including there a calendar of the events in Lady Susan.

Ellen Moody also has completed a close reading of Jane Austen’s letters, posted on her Reveries Under the Sign of Austen blog, which Austen fans might enjoy. It begins here.

Have you seen the film Love and Affection? What did you think of it?

Sweet Caress, by William Boyd

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Boyd is another author of many books who is new to me. This one sounded like something I’d love: the story of a fictional photographer, Amory Clay, living through the first three-quarters of the 20th century. A professional woman’s life, the events of the last century, a much-loved author (apparently) with multiple awards, rave reviews for this novel: what could go wrong?

Much, apparently. While the story had moments of interest, I found it hollow at the core. Not only was it not compelling, it was rather boring. I’ll get to the reasons for that in a bit.

The story is narrated by Amory in straight-forward past tense, occasionally interrupted by journal entries from 1977, the “present” of the story. Born in 1908, Amory has a charmed childhood. Boyd includes fun quirky details such as her earliest memory being of her father doing a handstand. However, her father returns from the Great War damaged in ways that are not visible. Meanwhile, a friend of the family, “Uncle” Greville, has given Amory a camera, setting her on the path to her eventual career.

The story follows her life through high points of the next decades, such as Berlin in the 1920s and New York in the 1930s. She becomes one of the first female war photographers in World War II and later in Vietnam. A successful career woman, she publishes books of her photos and works on magazines.

The book is sprinkled with photographs, found by the author at places like estate sales and included to enhance the illusion that Amory is a real person. However, they backfired for me because their quality was so poor. I could not accept them as favorite prints of an accomplished photographer.

I was interested in her career, but in fact, the story is much more concerned with her love life. That sigh you hear? That’s me. Maybe a giddy 20-year-old would be more obsessed with her affairs than her art and career, but across a woman’s entire lifetime? It felt like a male author’s fantasy of a woman’s preoccupations. I should have been warned by the title.

The other reason the book felt empty to me is that Amory herself is hollow. She lives through exciting and terrifying events without any emotion. In fact, there were only two brief moments in the entire story where I detected any tremor of feeling. Since Boyd is supposedly such an accomplished author, I have to assume this is deliberate.

Can anyone, male or female, be so cold as this woman? It may be reticence rather than coldness, but it still keeps the book from engaging the reader. After the first terrible event, she says, “I had what I now suppose was a form of nervous breakdown.” That’s not really enough to stir feeling in a reader. As Donald Maass—an incredible writer, agent and teacher—says: just telling the reader a character feels an emotion doesn’t make the reader feel it.

It’s a shame because the story is so promising and the prose, aside from its lack of emotion, well done. Dialogue is crisp; settings and characters economically and effectively described; action scenes tight.

In The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, Alice W. Flaherty differentiates between cognitive meaning and emotional meaning. Of the latter she says, “This noncongitive notion of meaning, a sense of emotional importance or ultimate goal, is independent of the more traditional semantic notion of meaning as definition or intellectual content.” She also calls them “temporal lobe meaning and limbic meaning”, suggesting that they are processed by different parts of the brain.

Perhaps Boyd meant this story to be cerebral rather than emotional. If that were so, though, surely it would be more productive to focus on something other than Amory’s love affairs: world events perhaps, or what it was like to be one of the first women in a male-dominated field, or even what it was like to have a career at a time when few women did. If the women’s suffrage movement or second-wave feminism were mentioned, I must have missed them.

If you’ve read this or other of Boyd’s books, please let me know in the comments what you thought of them.

What novel have you read that captures the entire span of a character’s life?

The Lake House, by Kate Morton

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Summer is here, and no vacation is complete without plenty of books to read. Ebooks made packing easy: just bring my Nook. This year, though, I’ve gone even lighter, reading books on my phone through the Nook and Kindle apps. Which books, though?

For long car trips (I seem to do a lot of these) I love audio books, but must select them carefully. Thrillers make me drive too fast; long-winded sentences or complicated concepts make me tune out because I can’t follow them while driving. And the actor matters as well. If the delivery is too monotone, my eyelids get heavy. I thought I’d chosen a great book for my last trip: one of my favorite authors. However, this particular novel was more of a psychological study; it would have been excellent reading (and I may come back to it) but too slow for a car trip.

If I’m flying I want a book that is absorbing but not too thought-provoking, since its purpose is to distract me from my surroundings and make the time go by quickly. For a recent flight I picked up this novel by Kate Morton, an author new to me, though this is her fifth novel.

It was perfect! I fell into the story and barely came up for air during the long day’s travel.

Sadie Swallow, a disgraced detective keeping her head down at her grandfather’s cottage in Cornwall, goes running and stumbles on a beautiful abandoned house. Fascinated by the house, she becomes riveted by the 70-year-old mystery of the disappearance of the small much-loved boy whose loss so broke his family that they could not bear to return.

The story goes back and forth in time to fill in her past and that of the elderly crime novelist who is the last remaining member of the family who lived there. This kind of time-shifting rarely works, but here Morton handles it brilliantly. Each chapter is a single time period and labeled up front, so there’s no confusion. What really makes it flow are the transitions within the text, the scene at the end of one chapter flowing seamlessly into the first scene of the next chapter; even if there is a huge time gap, the story feels continuous.

The crime novelist, Alice Edevane, older sister of the lost toddler, is easily the most intriguing character in the book. While very successful as a writer, Alice loathes publicity and is impatient with people who don’t meet her standards. Those standards emerge through her interactions with Peter, the man she hires as a personal assistant, and later with Sadie: on time for appointments, clever (in the British sense of intelligent and practical), and a quality I used to call clear through: open and honest, without social artifice—someone you can trust.

I loved spending time with Alice. And also with Sadie. As a very junior female detective she’s smart but a little too willing to go her own way, ignoring orders from above, thus getting on the wrong side of her superiors. She has a bit of a troubled background, hence being brought up by her grandparents, and is too driven by work to care for a houseplant much less a relationship.

In addition to enjoying the characters, I too fell for the house and for the life the family led there before their tragedy. Set in Cornwall and the London I’d just left how could I resist? The atmosphere reminded me a little of the first part of Atonement. I loved Sadie’s grandfather and his life as a widower, making pies for the fête, walking his two dogs. He’s at peace with himself and able to advise Sadie without seeming too good to be true.

Some cross-genre novels shortchange one or another of their genres. For example, The Girl on the Train was a good thriller, but disappointing as a mystery. Here, Morton manages to present a satisfying mystery in a historical novel that also tackles important issues in women’s lives.

There were a couple of things I thought too improbable and if editing the book would have advised Morton to change. But overall a most satisfying read. I’ll certainly take along one of her other novels on my next flight.

Can you recommend a good audio book for a car trip or one for a flight?

Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell

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A recent post by Ellen Moody about Gaskell’s novel North and South reminded me that I hadn’t read anything by this author besides her Life of Charlotte Brontë. I set out to remedy that gap starting with this, her first novel.

Little did I know how relevant to today’s political situation it would turn out to be. As Moody said, many of Gaskell’s books, including North and South and Mary Barton, share a “radical political vision.” The author embodies this vision through characters and plot but also sometimes steps back to give the big picture and further context. Instead of being preachy, though, the novel had me fully immersed and racing to finish it. It’s a bit sentimental at times, but Gaskell manages to keep it moving.

Set in Manchester in 1839, the story concerns two working class families: the Bartons and the Wilsons. John Barton, grieved by the loss of his wife and the terrible economic distress of the time, becomes involved in the trade union and Chartist movements. He rails against the gap between rich and poor, between mill owners and workers. When his closest friend, George Wilson, remarks that Barton never liked the “gentlefolks”, Barton responds:

“And what good have they ever done me that I should like them . . . If I am sick, do they come and nurse me? If my child lies dying (as poor Tom lay, with his white wan lips quivering, for want of better food than I could give him), does the rich man bring the wine or broth that might save his life? If I am out of work for weeks in the bad times, and winter comes, with black frost, and keen east wind, and there is no coal for the grate, and no clothes for the bed, and the thin bones are seen through the ragged clothes, does the rich man share his plenty with me, as he ought to do, if his religion wasn’t a humbug? . . . No, I tell you, it’s the poor, and the poor only, as does such things for the poor. Don’t think to come over me with th’ old tale, that the rich know nothing of the trials of the poor. I say, if they don’t know, they ought to know. We’re their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows; and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds . . .”

Both men fall on hard times as the mill cuts back on workers (but not on the mill owners’ lavish entertainments). John Barton and George Wilson end up relying on their children’s income. George’s hard-working son Jem has long loved John’s daughter Mary, but she has been walking out with Harry Carson, a mill owner’s son. She believes he intends to marry her, but of course he doesn’t plan on crossing that social boundary.

With food prices rising and jobs disappearing, families are starving. Gaskill’s descriptions of the suffering of the poor are shocking. As she explains in her Preface, she hopes through her story to convey the desperate situation of the working poor and their resentment of the mill owners, in the hope that those who can will be moved to help through legislation and private charity.

I recently visited the Foundling Museum in London to explore the history of the Foundling Hospital established in 1739 by Thomas Coram. He was horrified by the number of babies left to die on the street by families that could not afford to feed them. The institution provided food, clothing, shelter and education, helping the grown children to find jobs or enter the military. While the hospital closed in 1954, the charity continues today as Coram.

What moved me to tears were the loving notes left for the children by desperate mothers and the displays of tokens left with them: a string of beads, a ribbon, thimble or crudely etched medallion—something unique that a mother returning to claim a child could describe to identify her son or daughter. Few could afford to return, though.

Outside, behind the statue of Thomas Coram there is a little sculpture by Tracy Emin of a mitten on the iron fence, like the tokens inside. People have tied ribbons to the nearby fence spikes.

It is children who suffer the most from the great disparity between rich and poor. Gaskell’s genius is to show us that children on both sides suffer, though differently.

What novel have you read that addresses social problems along with the characters’ story?

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The Rogue and Other Portuguese Stories, by Julieta Almeida Rodrigues

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This is the second collection of stories from Rodrigues, but the first I’ve read. They are set in Portugal, but more than that, they aim to get at the essence of the Portuguese character. In her Foreword, Rodrigues states her intention to reveal aspects of Portuguese identity. She says, “Written from a sociological perspective, my narratives illuminate a wide range of topics in contemporary Portugal.”

That’s a big burden to put on a book. In some ways, the stories seem more like character portraits than stories, but more about that later.

True to the author’s intention, the stories feature a variety of situations: a woman in prison taking a yoga class, a young lawyer in his first job eager to please his boss, a fourteen-year-old girl writing a school composition on post-colonialism in Portugal. Some protagonists are professionals; some are down-on-their-luck aristocrats. There are prostitutes, abuse victims, battered women.

Even with this variety of voices, though, there is a curious constancy of tone, something calm and confident.

This comes partly from the prose—the syntax and word choice—but also from the plot structure. While most writers here in the U.S. are encouraged to start their stories in media res—in the middle of the action that sets the story’s events in motion—these stories usually start with a leisurely summary of background information on the protagonist or, in some cases, the setting. Even the title story, which begins with dialogue, is a woman telling the background information to a lawyer.

One of my writing partners is Portuguese, so I understand the different assumptions about structure. In Portugal, I’m told, it is expected that writers present the background and their evidence in measured and logical order before getting to the point, whether it’s a thesis statement or a plot goal. Instead of being frustrated or bored, I found these establishing shots comforting.

The other structural aspect that I noticed is where the stories end. Instead of ending with climax where the protagonist either succeeds or fails at his or her goal, each story ends at the beginning of a turning point, when the balance just begins to tip one way or the other. Expecting more complications, I was surprised each time. It felt as though we were just getting a glimpse into a slice of the protagonist’s life rather than a full story about them.

Still, I enjoyed the stories. And it’s good to be reminded that there are many ways to put a story together. As Paul Harding says, “. . . it’s nice to think that if you follow a prefabricated set of rules you’ll get a story or a poem or a novel out of it. But a huge part of being a writer is discovering your own intellectual and aesthetic autonomy, and how you best get the best words onto the page.”

What stories set in Portugal have you read?

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

The Risk Pool, by Richard Russo

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Russo is one of my favorite writers. I’ve written about his first book, Mohawk. His second novel is also set in that fictional town and like the first is hilarious and true, full of flawed and damaged characters whom Russo treats with compassion even as he details their absurdities.

Ned Hall narrates the story for us. Although he uses the voice of an adult, he enters fully into the thoughts and feelings of his younger self. When he is six, Ned makes the mistake of telling people at school that his absent father was dead, thus bringing Sam Hall back into the lives of himself and his long-suffering mother. As a result, in addition to working at the phone company and raising a boy on her own, Jenny Hall has to suffer incursions that feel like raids by Sam, who manages to stay one step ahead of the local police and their restraining order. Then Sam kidnaps Ned. It’s just for an overnight fishing trip, but Jenny has no way of knowing that, and she is waiting for them with a gun.

Of course, my sympathies are with Ned’s mother, but this isn’t her story. It is Ned’s story of his tangled relationship with the father one of whose friends said “should have been issued with a warning label.” Like some New Englanders I’ve known, Sam manages to cobble together a ramshackle sort of life with seasonal jobs, unemployment, local bars, and the occasional girlfriend. His philosophy is that when things start to seem impossibly bad, something would “give”: a loan, a job, a lucky bet at the track.

Of course, what Ned really wants is for his father to love him. One of my favorite sections of the book is when Ned goes to live with his father for a few years; the culture shock is there but also the easy adaptability of a child. This coming-of-age story continues into Ned’s adulthood and beyond. Their curious relationship is epitomized by Sam’s usual “Well?”, expecting Ned to catch up on his own, without any parental guidance. Ned sees through his father, even at an early age noting the way Sam takes over a conversation about Jenny’s breakdown, and concluding “It will always be his story, about how he hadn’t believed it could be true.”

Even though Mohawk is in upstate New York, it and its denizens remind me so much of the milltowns I knew in Massachusetts that I kept forgetting where we were. It reminded me of Andre Dubus’s memoir Townie , both in its setting—in Dubus’s case Haverill, Massachusetts—and in the story’s focus on his relationship with his absent father. I also loved the way Sam’s friends, some of them stable but more of them disreputable, watch out for Ned and try to help him. This aspect of the book reminded me strongly of J. R. Moehringer’s memoir The Tender Bar. While Russo’s book is fiction, it has the strength and power of these memoirs. I admit to being a bit fascinated by these books about men and the way they are together when there are no women around. These stories depict a tenderness and a supportive web that are at odds with the stereotypes.

What coming-of-age story have you read that resonated with you?

Euphoria, by Lily King

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King’s exciting novel, which has gotten mostly rave reviews, tells the story of three anthropologists doing field work in New Guinea: Nell Stone, her husband Fen, and Andrew Bankson. The three meet up when Nell and Fen are fleeing from the suddenly threatening tribe they have been living among and studying. The couple are in bad shape: both are unwashed and ill with malaria; Nell has lost her glasses and broken her ankle. They are a godsend, though, to Bankson, so desperately lonely that he’s recently attempted suicide.

Nell’s latest book has become a surprise best-seller, leaving Fen fiercely jealous of her fame. Fen, who seems to prefer hanging out with the men and living a native life rather than actually completing the field work he’s taken on, soon has more to be jealous of when Bankson falls for Nell in a big way. First, though, Bankson falls for them as a couple and persuades them to study a tribe not far from the one he lives among, so that he can see them occasionally.

The novel, this month’s read for my book club, is “inspired by” the true story of Margaret Mead, her husband Reo Fortune, and the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson. The three worked together on a 1933 field trip to New Guinea.

King has done her research. I especially appreciated the portrait of Mead. This is a heroine who is not gorgeous. In fact, she’s described as “a sickly, pocket-sized creature with a face like a female Darwin.” What’s beautiful about her is her brain. The passages describing her novel ways of interacting with the women and children of the tribe and those describing her talking about and writing up her findings are mesmerizing.

It’s rare enough that we get a portrait of the role of a career in a woman’s life. For me, the most thrilling scene in the book is not one of the many involving physical or emotional danger, but the scene where the three of them come up with a new way to look at cultures; the mounting excitement as they build on each other’s ideas left me breathless.

Much of the novel is accurate, but some—disturbingly—is wildly fictional. And this brings me to my major concern with the book. Since it is widely acknowledged and even included in the book’s front and back matter that the book is based on the lives of three real people, it seems to me unconscionable to take such liberties with their lives.

For one thing, Fen is presented as almost completely negative. He’s a cad, a bounder, a good-for-nothing. Granted Bankson as the narrator has little reason to see good in Fen as he becomes more and more attached to the man’s wife. Yet, the occasional excerpts from Nell’s diary don’t redress this imbalance. Perhaps Reo Fortune was indeed all of these things, including the darker hints at violence. I don’t know. But trampling a man’s reputation when he’s not alive to defend himself is a low blow.

Some other events are shockingly different from the lives of Mead, Fortune, and Bateson—and not always to their credit. To me, muddying the record of real people’s lives oversteps a moral boundary. If the author is going to take the shortcut of using real people as characters, then she is responsible for sticking as close to the truth of their lives as she possibly can. Here, the story is so engrossing that readers, even those familiar with the details of Mead’s life, will come away imprinted with King’s strong scenes.

In Immortality Milan Kundera describes how people want the “immortality of those who after their death remain in the memory of posterity,” but after we’re gone we cannot control what that memory looks like. He gives many examples, particularly the way Bettina von Arnim controlled the image of Goethe after his death, inflating her flirtation with him into a grand and tragic romance.

My other concern has to do with the ending. King’s book is so well-written, almost too vividly bringing alive the jungle environment and the tribes who live there, building suspense that keeps the reader spellbound. And then boom! It’s over. All the story lines tied up a neat deus-ex-machina (and fictional) bow.

The members of my book club unanimously agreed that, aside from the abrupt ending, it was an absorbing read. We enjoyed learning more about the three anthropologists’ different approaches to their field. Some found their methods unscientific and flawed, without for example accounting for observer bias and the adulterating effect of their presence. Some objected to the portrayal of the native tribes: seen through Bankson’s eyes, they are like children compared to the mature western cultures. However, this is an accurate picture of the standard practices and theories of the time.

For writers of historical fiction, this is a constant problem: how do you accurately depict a past era’s culture while not repulsing the modern reader? It calls for a careful balancing act. I think King succeeds here by giving us a bit of the modern viewpoint in different characters. For example, Bankson begins to wonder if his living among a tribe has changed their habits and culture; Nell treats the women she is studying with respect and as equals, not as children or her inferiors.

While the story is basically a love triangle, the excellent writing and the stunning descriptions of the work lift it into something fresh and exciting. Just check out the facts about the three very real people whose lives have here been carved to fit the author’s glass slipper.

What do you think about using real people as the basis for fiction?

Jar City: A Reykjavik Thriller, by Arnaldur Indriðason

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I have long had a soft spot for Iceland, partly from Halldór Laxness’s novels, so I was excited to find this mystery set in Reykjavik. The first of Indriðason’s books to be translated into English, Jar City starts with Detective Inspector Erlendur at the scene of a murder. In the sitting room of the basement flat he finds the body of a 70-year-old man who has been hit in the head with a heavy glass ashtray. Although Icelandic murders are not complicated, Erlendur knows this case will be different. In fact, everyone at the crime scene realises that this murder is something quite special, because they have seen the cryptic note left on the body, only three stunning words.

You want to know what they are, don’t you? So did I. When a mystery opens with this sentence “The words were written in pencil on a piece of paper placed on top of the body” you don’t expect to have to get through half the book before you find out what those words are.

This trick is what Ray Rhamey of Flogging the Quill calls an information question. He explains that the first page of any novel should raise a story question—a plot question about what will happen next—but not a simple question about information that the characters in the scene obviously have but the author has chosen not to reveal. Information questions break the contract between writer and reader, a contract especially binding in a murder mystery where the reader is challenged to identify clues and put them together to reach the answer before the detective does.

The note is only the first of several information questions in the book. Another egregious one is the identity of Erlendur’s mentor Marion Briem, whom we are told in a foreword has a gender-neutral name and whose gender is never identified by a pronoun. I’m all in favor of appreciating the spectrum of gender, but here it’s done so coyly that it just feels phoney. Information questions are a cheap way to try to create suspense instead of actually working to create suspense through the story. And they are irritating.

Aside from the information questions and some inconsistent word choices that are probably the fault of the translator (i.e., slang from different countries and different parts of the U.S. inexplicably mixed together), the book is quite good. Indriðason’s prose is appropriately spare, giving the reader a feel for life in Iceland’s capital city.

Erlendur is the usual sloppily dressed, lonely detective. He has two grown children: Eva Lind, a drug addict who provides a subplot for the book, and a son of whom we’re only told that he’s in “rehab”. Presumably that’s for recovery from alcohol or drugs rather than a knee replacement, but once again we are not given that information.

The story behind the murder is laid out well, with deceptive blind alleys and red herrings. Best of all, there is a larger story, a story about an aspect of society specific to Iceland but relevant to all of us.

You want to know what that larger story is, don’t you? Irritating, isn’t it? But in this case, I’m sparing you from a spoiler. If you can get past your irritation, the book is actually a good read.

Have you read any books set in Iceland?