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O'Faolain is the author of the well-regarded memoir, Are You Somebody? I haven't read it yet but will. Her prose is gorgeous, absorbing. I can't remember when I last lost myself in a novel as I did in this one.

My Dream of You is another novel about a woman who journeys far from her native Ireland. Kathleen de Burca is a middle-aged travel writer based in London who, when not scouring the world for material for her articles, lives in a dark and dismal basement flat off Euston Road. Where she really feels at home, though, is the small office on the top floor of a Victorian building “right up under the slates”, with its big window looking out over the rooftops of London and the green of the linden trees in the square below.

Kathleen shares the office with Jimmy, her fellow writer and best friend, Roxy the secretary who fills the window with Busy Lizzies and geraniums, and their boss Alex, whose constant presence and meticulous consistency grounds them all. Kathleen and Jimmy are so attuned to each other that they carry on elliptical dialogues of gestures and code words that baffle Alex completely. The two of them come up with off-the-wall ideas for articles (reminding me of the bizarre tours suggested in The Biographer's Tale). At Christmas, Jimmy takes her home to his family in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where being gay isn't half so bad as not being a jock. Kathleen does not take him to Ireland. In fact, she hasn't been back since boarding the ferry at 20, carrying away her anger and tears.

Although confident and assured while exploring foreign cities, Kathleen is curiously passive when it comes to men. She reminds me of some women I knew in the first flush of the sexual revolution in the 1960s who seemed to feel obliged to sleep with any man who asked. However, Kathleen's behavior seems unbelievable now when we know so much about HIV and other STDs. Yet so much rings true: her recklessness, her lack of concern for herself, her belief that going to bed with a man is the only way to truly know him. Being in the body is for her being alive.

When a sudden loss throws her world into disarray, Kathleen takes refuge in the idea of researching an old court case from the 1850s, just after the worst of the Hunger. Richard Talbot, a wealthy Anglo-Irish landlord, sought a divorce from his wife Marianne on the grounds of adultery with a servant. A note at the beginning of the book tells us that the excerpts from the Talbot Judgment are quoted from the actual Talbot divorce case.

The case has interested Kathleen for years, ever since her first love, Hugo, casually handed her a copy of the Judgment. What fascinates her is the larger picture of a young, pampered Englishwoman taking up with a rough Irish stablehand. Did he even speak English? During this time when landlords were evicting their Irish tenants wholesale and razing their cottages, whole villages were emptied, the strong emigrating, the weak dying, and the few survivors dug into holes in the ground for homes, out by the bogs. Within this larger picture of the relationship between their two countries, the image of a sweet and enduring love that emerges from the legal papers seems to Kathleen worth pursuing. She abandons her job and goes to Ireland to research what she hopes will become a book.

Aside from the sheer beauty of her prose, what O'Faolain does so brilliantly is to work in scenes from the past so that they become a seamless part of the narrative. Knowing where to place parts of the backstory, how much to reveal at one time, what transitions to use to ease readers in and out of the past: many writers, including me, struggle with these issues. Yet O'Faolain pulls it all together, seemingly without effort, dipping back at just the right moment to give us tales of Hugo, adventures with Jimmy, Kathleen's mother, and what went wrong with Alex. Every time I go back and try to analyse how she does it, I get caught up in the story again, enchanted, engrossed.

Toibin is one of my book club's favorite authors. We've read The Master and before that The Heather Blazing which I picked up in a used tools and books sale in a small town in England. We are impressed with his versatility, but what we really love is his ability to pack so much meaning and emotion into a single scene, a single gesture. We selected his most recent novel for October, a safe choice I thought until I read it. Then I feared that this unassuming story of a young woman who emigrates from Ireland to the U.S. in the 1950s would not provide much fodder for discussion. However, it prompted one of our liveliest and most sustained discussions.

Eilis Lacey lives in a small town with her widowed mother and older sister Rose. At 30, the lovely and self-confident Rose works as a bookkeeper at a local mill and plays golf with her many friends. Eilis herself is taking accounting courses and is obviously quite smart but held back by the limited employment opportunities in town. Rose conspires with Father Flood, visiting from New York, to arrange for transportation, lodging and a job in Brooklyn for her younger sister. Faced with leaving her home and friends and the life she has always assumed she would have, Eilis is miserable but complies.

This setup for her life in the New World contains what I saw as the main flaws in the book. First, whenever the slightest hint of a problem or conflict arises, a solution immediately presents itself. Second, everyone, even people who don't know her, go out of their way to help her: the priest, her cabinmate on the ship, her landlady in New York. Third, Eilis herself seems passive, allowing other people to make the major decisions in her life, not just Rose, but her boyfriend in New York, her supervisor, Father Flood.

Many in the book club loved the story, one saying that it was the kind of book she used to read, that made her love reading: a linear narrative with one point of view and a slow pace. “No bling” as she put it. He lets the story tell itself. It's true that we've read a number of more or less successful experimental novels lately. However, I disagree with my friend. I think that in spite of its traditional format, Brooklyn is a very experimental novel. It seems to me that Toibin has challenged himself to write about an ordinary young woman leading a life that—outside of her journey to America—is remarkably uneventful, and still make it an interesting, readable story. He succeeds. One person mentioned that nowadays when authors are steeped in Chekhov, we expect every plot point to be significant, but life isn't like that.

Others in the book club talked about how much they liked Eilis. She has a moral compass which gives her strength in spite of her apparent passivity. She is not judgmental in a time when people in the U.S. were very judgmental. She stays true to herself and does the right thing, such as taking a new boarder to the dance. One person suggested that her apparent passivity is really just the way life has of turning you one way or another. A different person pointed out that most of the people in this book don't actually talk to each other; they don't say the important things. Eilis doesn't tell her mother and Rose that she wants to stay. Rose doesn't share her own plans and problems with Eilis. Choosing not to talk about things was only too common in those pre-let-it-all-hang-out days.

Where I most felt a hole in the book was the lack of conflict. Whenever a difficulty arises, such as a locked bathroom door, someone provides a solution. Gifts fall into Eilis's lap: the first man she meets turns out to be Mr. Right; his family loves her even though they are not Irish; all potential roadblocks dissolve. Conflicts that could have generated entire books in themselves—integrating the store where she works, a suggestion of sexual harassment—are no big deal and immediately dropped. Everybody loves her. Is it really possible to have so charmed a life?

Without conflict a character doesn't change, and indeed while her outward appearance changes, Eilis is the same person at the end as in the beginning. So why did everyone like the book so much? It is a good read; Toibin's marvelous prose made me want to read just one more paragraph, one more chapter. We like spending time with Eilis. One of our members, an emigrant herself, talked of how true to life the description of the emigrant experience is, particularly the way when you are in one world, you have no connection with the other world. The slower pace and lack of big scenes made us more aware of subtle successes, such as a scene in a bookstore where Eilis is overwhelmed by the number of books, and the brilliant, understated portrayal of the first two women of color to enter the store. Middle-aged, glamorous, wearing cream-colored woolen coats, they chat with each other, never looking directly at the salespeople. They have the same self-sufficient dignity and integrity that Eilis has.

Toibin still manages to create tension, even without apparent conflicts. The unspoken truths add tension. Also, at any moment her life could go either way. I guess I was the only one who was a bit disappointed, but I applaud Toibin's accomplishment. The book is loving portrayal of a person and a time, all the rough edges smoothed away, nostalgic without being sentimental.

This is not the book for a casual reader looking for a good yarn. As with most of Byatt’s books, this extended rumination on the art of biography repays thoughtful attention and rereading. Admittedly, I am occasionally an inattentive reader, but it is only on this, my second reading, that the book begins to yield up its treasures.

It opens as Phineas G. Nanson realizes that he cannot bear to continue his graduate work in postmodern literary theory. He needs facts, things, not semiotic theories picking away at the veins of intentional and unintentional meanings underlying words and phrases, most of which come to seem an imposition of the analyst’s privileged thoughts on those of the writer.

Uncertain what to do next, he consults a professor, one of the heads of the department, Ormerode Goode, who suggests he read Scholes Destry-Scholes’s three-volume biography of Sir Elmer Bole. Nanson marvels at the breadth of knowledge that Destry-Scholes attains in order to—literally and figuratively—follow in Bole’s footsteps, reading everything that Bole read, going everywhere that Boles went, mastering languages, becoming an expert in Byzantine mosaics, tulip cultivation, and Madagascan lemurs.

Elmer Bole himself devoted at least part of his life to following a 17th century Turkish traveler, Evliya Chelebi, even taking on Evliya’s nickname, Siyyah, the Traveler, thus opening an intriguing hall of mirrors of endless reflections. We are never able to identify the ur-life that started this endless trail of study and imitation. Nanson determines to write a biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes and, like his subject, he plans to read everything Destry-Scholes read, go everywhere, and so on. “But no string has an end. Like spider-silk unreeling.” Therefore, Nanson thinks that he will be satisfied—thrilled—to add a few footnotes, a clarifying tidbit based on more recent science to Destry-Scholes’s storehouse of knowledge.

Byatt’s book is short on story and long on jumbled snippets of scholarship as Nanson discovers fragmented research notes on three historical figures, presumably in preparation for writing a joint biography. As Nanson struggles to order and understand these fragments, we are given them intact to make of them what we will, just as we were given chunks of transcripts and stories, and even Frederica’s cut-up journals in earlier books. The mind struggles to hold all the disparate bits and invent a narrative to tie them together, all the while wondering if it is just a fool’s game, like Destry-Scholes’s niece spending hours comparing his collection of marbles to the list of their names, trying to determine which name belongs to which marble.

Such a style of writing reflects our frenetic and fractured world, its hyperlinks and jump cuts challenging our attention and attempts at sustained and critical thought. Since this whirlwind is precisely what I wish to escape when I pickup a novel, it may be obvious that this is not my favorite style. However, I am, as always, seduced by the intelligence behind the games and by the perennially fascinating question of what in fact we can know about another person.

I turned to this book a second time because of its focus on 19th century natural historians and arcane collections, thinking still about cabinets of curiosities. I also wanted to reread it because I have been thinking a lot about the shape of a life and the legacy left behind. We may have the bits and pieces we can learn about a person. We can rearrange these tesserae trying to form a pattern, trying to recreate the person’s thoughts. But ultimately the past is a foreign country and its people strangers to us. We impose our own thoughts on the tracings left behind, creating a palimpsest that may bear no resemblance to the actual person. And of course it is not just the past. Everyone is a stranger to us, even those we think we know well, with stories our only way into their minds and hearts.

McClelland & Stewart put out a special, hard-back edition of this short story by the author of Such a Long Journey (winner of the Governor General’s Award) and three other books, with royalties going to World Literacy of Canada. The story is an old man’s monologue that starts with his being awakened in the night by a scream outside his window.

Although set in India, the narrator’s concerns are universal as he struggles with his declining abilities and his growing conviction that his family is secretly working against him. He believes, for example, that they put ice on the cement ledge where he likes to sit, making it even colder and more uncomfortable for him. He relates how they pretend that the servant is his grandson, even letting him sit at table with them. He uses long and unfamiliar words—fifty-cent words such as caliginous, hypogean, galimatias, sesquipedalianism—to demonstrate that he still has his wits about him and is still smarter than his family.

The language is superb, such as the narrator’s description of sleeping all together in the back room, before he was banished to the front room. He speaks of listening all night to “their orchestra of wind instruments, their philharmonia of dyspepsia”. I loved the small details of daily life, such as the description of the chanavala selling gram and peanuts, with his tin can of spices.

The book is illustrated by Tony Urquhart using different types of paper, including the marbleized paper sometime used for endpapers of books, tempera and gel pens. Dreamy and slightly abstract, the illustrations add depth and texture to the story. For example, illustrations with snippets of a keyboard tumbling through the air contribute to the sense of disorientation, the fear that one cannot trust reality.

As I approach a significant birthday, I find myself thinking a lot about aging, about the small gains and losses each year. I appreciate this rant, this raging against the fading of the light, more than any sweet, consolatory fairy tale. However mistaken the narrator may be in details, his sense that he is being left alone to suffer the ravages of age and his belief that something is being stolen from him are only too real.

I met a man yesterday who claimed to have died and come back to life. He was being taken to the hospital when his ambulance collided with a firetruck. Pronounced dead at the scene, he was taken to the morgue in a body bag. Being an organ donor, he was taken from the morgue to have his organs harvested. By the time he regained consciousness, having been told (he claimed) that it was not yet his time, the doctors had removed one of his kidneys. I found his story hard to believe and almost asked, Thomas-like, to see his scar, but his story did make me wonder about negotiating with death.

This week I am mourning the sudden loss of a friend, beloved by many, gone too soon. I will miss him, and miss too the further wonderful things he would have accomplished had he lived a bit longer. Thinking of this story, I realise that much as I fear going too soon, I fear even more hanging on too long. I fear dementia more than death.

Post Captain is the second book in this famous series which I never got around to reading until this summer. Actually, I listened to it in the car, narrated by Patrick Tull. I found the first book, Master and Commander, rather slow going. It starts at a concert in Port Mahon, Minorca where Jack Aubrey gets so excited by the music that he beats time—not entirely accurately—to the consternation of the man sitting next to him, Stephen Maturin, a doctor of half-Irish, half-Catalan heritage.

Despite this inauspicious beginning the two become friends, and Jack invites Stephen to join his sloop, the Sophie, as ship surgeon. Stephen, who is in some financial difficulty, agrees. Thus they are launched on their adventures, protecting British vessels and tracking down French and Spanish ships during the Napleonic Wars.

Jack treats is all as a great adventure, coming off as a rather simple fellow most of the time. However, he shines in battle where he comes up with daring and ingenious ploys to outwit the enemy. Stephen's mind has a more serious cast. Interested in natural history, he collects and studies specimens during their travels and deplores not only the carnage of battle but also some facets of sailing life, such as the regular consumption of rum and the occasional flogging.

Much of the tedium of the first book for me lay in the long expositions on sailing craft, as Stephen is instructed by his kind crewmates. While I see how these sections might be fascinating to some, I know too little to be able to picture what was being described. The two characters speaking were looking at the ship's masts, sails, rigging, etc., so of course had no need to describe them to each other, leaving me somewhat at sea. Perhaps knowledge of such things as what a topgallant might look like is assumed, but more narrative description would have helped me. Anyway, I'm always more interested in the relationships between characters and the conflicts that arise between them, and there were enough of these to send me to this second book.

Post Captain starts during the Peace of Amiens when commanders and common seamen have been thrown out of work. Jack takes a house in the country, and he and Stephen become friendly with a nearby family that includes several young women. However, this Austen-like interlude is abruptly terminated when two reversals of fortune leave Jack not only bankrupt, but on the run lest he land in debtors' prison. While he and Stephen are in Europe, war breaks out again, catching them unaware and placing them in great danger isolated in enemy territory.

I liked this second book tremendously. The storylines related to the young women continue through the book while the relationship between the two men deepens and becomes more complex. And the battle scenes are stunning. O'Brien braids in sensory details—the taste of powder in the air, the booming of the guns—without diluting the suspense and excitement. I understand from O'Brien's introduction and Wikipedia that the author based these scenes on the real exploits of Lord Cochrane and other naval heroes. Writers steal people's stories all the time. For example, Faulkner frankly confessed that his stories were based on family tales and the shenanigans of his neighbors in Oxford.

In both these books I also enjoyed the interplay among the crew. Only a few emerge as individuals, but O'Brien manages to convey shifting tides of relationships between individuals and the crew as a whole in just the briefest of scenes. There are some promising—indeed tantalising—storylines here that I hope will be followed up in future books.

Writing a series like this gives a writer huge scope for developing his characters. I wonder how much O'Brien plotted out the series before he started. J. K. Rowling says that she had the out line for the whole Harry Potter series before she started writing. Other writers stumble into it, meaning to write only one book and ending up with many, such as Agatha Christie who famously bemoaned having stuck herself with a Belgian detective. These stories have the air of plunging ahead, the author discovering along with us what happens next, but that could just be good writing.

In the midst of a rather trying week, I selected this mystery to read. Mysteries not only absorb me into another world, but also fill most of my available brain-space with a puzzle to be solved.

Nora Kelly is an architect at the New York Museum of Natural History, where much of the story takes place. I went there for the first time a couple of years ago and was entranced. I wish I'd known about it earlier, when my boys were young. So I was delighted to plunge into descriptions of the museum's public areas and exhibitions, as well as the nether regions where scientists pursue research and archives collect dust.

Nora is approached by Special Agent Pendergast, who carries an FBI identity badge although his actual position within the FBI is unclear, who captures her attention by presenting her with a skull. He ropes her into investigating a construction site where the giant excavator has broken through to a foundation from the 1880s and discovered a cache of human remains.

Together they try to untangle the ancient crimes, with the assistance of Nora's sometime boyfriend, who is an investigative reporter, and the policeman assigned to Pendergast as a liaison. Although initially Nora doesn't want to get involved, being preoccupied by squabbles with her boss back at the museum, a small clue found at the site suddenly brings home to her the humanity of these relics, that these bones were once people, young people, with their own dreams and responsibilities.

The emotional journeys undertaken by all four of these major characters combined with the puzzle make for an absorbing read. One of the parts I liked best was the historical context of the cabinets of curiosties assembed by 19th century amateur naturalists. I've long been interested in that period's gentlemen-scientists, when untrained men with money and leisure pursued an interest in natural history or exploration or military science, sometimes with tragic consequences such as with Shackleton and Scott whose mistaken ideas led their Antarctic expeditions into danger, or the military officers whose inexperience and incompetence contributed to the grievous casualty lists in the Great War.

I call them amateurs because, unlike today, there were no educational programs in these fields to train potential scientists in an established curriculum, no gatekeepers to validate a self-proclaimed authority's credentials. Even the word “scientist” didn't exist before 1840, according to the OED. Granted, the military had training programs, but becoming an officer had more to do with social class and longevity than with leadership ability or military expertise.

Naturalists of the period assembled their own quirky collections, as described in some of A.S. Byatt's novels. Many went on to exhibit them as cabinets of curiosity. As part of a recent renovation, the Walters Art Gallery (itself based on the collection of Henry Walters) opened a series of rooms they call the Chamber of Wonders which is a recreation of such a personal collection, combining Etruscan artworks, coins from ancient Greece, and rare specimens of birds, to name just a few.

It's a fascinating exhibit. I was reminded of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London and the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia, both eccentric personal collections left intact for public view. According to the account here, the Museum of Natural History got its start buying up local cabinets of curiosities as their owners were forced into bankruptcy after the museum opened with free admission.

Another feature of this book that interested me was the partnership of authors. While reading, I found myself wondering how they divided up the work. Did they write alternate chapters? Or did each pursue a different part of the story? Slate is currently running a series on the creative potential of partnerships as opposed to the stereotype of the lone struggling genius. It makes for interesting reading.

Since horror and the paranormal/supernatural do not interest me, I confess I just ignored those aspects of the story. The mystery alone was sufficient suspense for me and distracted me from my trying week just as I'd hoped. At a writing workshop I was leading, I met a young woman who said that when she was sad or upset, she would lie down on her bed, pull up her favorite quilt, and lose herself in a book—exactly what I did with this mystery. Whatever else this book may be, it is a most effective transportation device.

This 2009 novel, winner of the National Book Award, was chosen by my book club for this month’s selection. The story follows a number of characters, each narrating his or her section of the book, all linked by the day that Philippe Petit (unnamed here) made his famous walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center. It was more than a walk; it was a dance, a gloriously daring and joyful performance, captured in the film Man on Wire which I highly recommend.

Although the book is truly a portrait of New York City, the first narrator is an Irishman, Ciaran, describing his childhood and his younger brother, Corrigan, whose idea of helping Dublin’s bums is to find common cause by getting plastered with them, an idea which seems likely to lead him either to the priesthood or the gutter. Eventually Ciaran follows his brother across the ocean to South Bronx where he finds Corrigan ministering to prostitutes. Other sections are narrated by a nurse, a photographer, a Park Avenue housewife, a single Black mother, a prostitute, a judge, among others. Most of their stories interconnect, some only glancingly, but all circle back to the day the man walked the wire.

Their stories are of grief and loss, inevitably, I suppose, since these are the dramatic moments of our lives, the moments when we feel most cut off from others. Yet, in this cross-section of the city at a particular moment of time, McCann gives us moments of redemption, though they are not easy, and of connection.

The reactions of my book club were mixed. Some people liked the book a lot, feeling that it represented the New York that they knew, saying that the book may be messy and uneven but you could say that about the city as well. Others found the book boring and the characters flat and their voices indistinguishable. My reaction was influenced by the medium: I listened to the audio book, in which each narrator was played by a different actor, all them excellent, bringing the characters to individual life. With their voices in my head, I cannot go back and look at the words on the page and judge whether they by themselves are sufficient.

Back in college, I took a course called Oral Interpretation taught by the inestimable Esther Smith, where we learned to go inside a piece of writing—play, poem, prose—and create and perform our own interpretation of it. We dissected nuances of body language and intonation. While I cannot say I ever excelled at the art of oral interpretation, the course did make me aware of what an actor brings to the performance—it is more than just a reading—of an audio book. I cannot tell how much of my reaction to each section is mediated by the actor’s performance.

Each of us in the book club liked some sections more than others, though not the same sections. For instance, one person liked best the part about the nascent friendship between the Park Avenue housewife and the single Black mother, which I thought too much of a stretch, while others didn’t believe the section that moved me most, the one in which a woman believes the distant figure on the wire was her son, who had been killed in Vietnam. The lawyer among us found the judge’s section true to life. And we all liked the very short section of the book narrated by the unnamed acrobat describing his training and the walk itself.

The book has been described as a 9-11 novel. Although, the story takes place in the 1970s and the future destruction of the World Trade Center is never mentioned, I too found it impossible to read this book without thinking about that horrific day. In 1974 when Petit made his famous walk, the towers had only recently been opened and were considered “the ugly stepchild of New York’s skyscrapers” as Jonathan Mahler put it in his New York Times review. With this book I felt that I held within my hands the birth and death of the towers as well as the lives of the characters and, indeed, those of my friends who died there that day. I began to understand the proposition that time is not linear after all, but folded in upon itself, our future encapsulated within our present.

Actually, I want to talk about all four of Ross’s mysteries, featuring Julian Kestrel, a fashionable young man in 1825 London. Although moving in the best circles, Kestrel is not the usual well-to-do fribble, but a man whose background—his aristocratic father married an actress and was cast off by his family and all of society—lets him look at that world slantwise. Having grown up on the Continent, Kestrel has been able to establish himself in society as a leader of fashion without revealing his background or his shaky finances. Kestrel reminds me of Selden in Wharton’s House of Mirth in his ability to stand to one side of society and critique it even while being a part of it.

In Cut to the Quick, Kestrel goes on a weekend visit at Bellegarde, country home of the Fontclairs. He finds a murdered woman in his bed and is forced to solve the crime in order to exonerate himself and his valet, a former pickpocket known as Dipper for his facility at his trade. In A Broken Vessel, Kestrel becomes embroiled in the world of prostitutes and reformers. Whom the Gods Love is the third book, in which Kestrel investigates the murder of Alexander Falkland, a man universally admired for his charm, intelligence, and artistic talent.

Over the course of the series, Kestrel comes to value the intellectual challenge of crime-solving and the meaning that it gives to his formerly rather aimless days. At the same time, he struggles with the consequences—of the crime, certainly, but even more interestingly, of the revelation of long-held secrets, an inevitable consequence of his investigations.

These are wonderful novels, with complex and well-drawn characters, satisfying puzzles, and a wonderfully conjured world of high and low society in Regency England. Sadly, there will be no more books in the series. Kate Ross died in 1998 at the age of 41.

Ross had been a trial lawyer, living in Brookline, Massachusetts. I feel as though I mist have known her. Maybe I brushed past her on the Brookline sidewalks as I went to visit friends. Perhaps we casually nodded to each other as we examined the treasures at the Gardner museum. I’m betting she was one of the spectators when my morris team danced the sun up on Maydays. She certainly knew about morris dancing; several times in the books she uses “morris off” as slang for “leave”.

I talked a bit about immortality last week. For a writer, as for any artist, any parent for that matter, our creations give us a chance of living on for a bit. Here I am, twelve years after her death, thinking about this woman whom I did not in fact know, wondering about the shape of her life, and feeling grateful that these four books keep her name alive.

On this Labor Day, it seems appropriate to think about the role of work in our lives. I remember the first time I visited the Tate, walking through room after room of Turner’s paintings with their huge splashes of light, and thinking: This is a man’s life. There can be no greater satisfaction than to be able to look around and say: I did this. I thought about visiting my friend, Susan, on her dairy farm. After I had regaled her with tales of my travels, my sons, my dancing and writing, she took me for a walk through the fields, pointing out one cow after another and telling me their names, laying a sun-browned hand on a flank or rubbing a dipped head. Now I think too of Stoner, that modest novel that has stayed with me over the months. At the end of his life, a life that would have left most men bitter, Stoner lies in bed holding the one book he has managed to write and believes that he has had a good life.

We all want—I believe—work to do that we can be proud of, that at the end of our lives we can point to and say: I did this. I reread these books every few years because I enjoy them, but also to celebrate Kate Ross and be glad that she had this accomplishment to be proud of at the end.

Last week’s Wolf Hall got me thinking about history. Since most of Mantel’s depiction of Thomas Cromwell’s character was invented, I wondered what right we have to tamper with persons and events from the past. Stories are what we remember, far more effectively than lists of facts. Those early lessons of Abe Lincoln reading in his log cabin and George Washington and the apple tree linger in some essential layer of our imagining, stronger than any later biographical reading, even after we know they are fictional. Film is even more lasting: biopics and even pure fiction about past events seem more real to us than the facts we carefully researched.

Milan Kundera’s Immortality investigates the effects of a tale told after someone’s death and how, told often enough, it can come to seem the truth, even when it is completely false, such as the images Bettina Brentano fabricated about both Goethe and Beethoven after their deaths becoming the ones that would be remembered. We see it today when politicians and talk radio blast a pernicious lie about someone in office, repeating it over and over until the foolish crowd comes to believe it is true. How much more insidious, then, to launch such a campaign after the person is dead and no longer around to defend themselves.

Writing a biography is a tremendously difficult task. Hard as it is to finish a novel—all those blank pages to fill—it is harder to write nonfiction, such as a memoir where you are limited to what actually happened and who people really are, at least to the best of your memory and perception. Biography is that much harder because you must research the person’s life, without your own memories to guide you. And it had better be someone who fascinates you because you are going to be spending years delving into the minutiae of that person’s days.

All these considerations increase my admiration for those historians and biographers who do make the huge investment to bring us stories of past lives. Some years ago, I heard Edmund Morris speak about Dutch, his controversial biography of Ronald Reagan where he inserted fictional characters and even an imaginary version of himself to help dramatise the story. Morris described the years of effort that go into researching a biography and his own horror when he realised that the person was simply not very interesting. While I don’t agree with Morris’s decision to fictionalise his biography, I do understand that in biography, as in memoir, you cannot help but distort the truth of a life by the scenes you decide to dramatise and the words you choose to describe them. Not that any of us knows what the truth is, even of our own lives.

I enjoyed Wolf Hall but knew little about Cromwell’s life and couldn’t evaluate the thoughts and feelings Mantel attributes to him. Certainly her picture of the man is consistent and believable. I did know a bit about the period and decided the best remedy for my uncertainty was to consult other sources.

I’ve always enjoyed Antonia Fraser’s histories. Her style is engaging and easy to read, even though she doesn’t resort to fictional techniques like invented dialogue. In this book, she gives us a Henry who becomes more and more impatient and self-indulgent, and sets this portrait within the context of the times, when marriage for love was rare for anyone, but especially so for a king. But her focus is really on each of the six wives in turn. She not only brings them to life, but uses them as a lens to look at the condition and treatment of women in the 16th century. For example, Anna of Cleves’s mother kept her close, not just to preserve Anna’s virginity with its cardinal importance as dowry, but also her sexual innocence, which gave her an air of virtue, perhaps even more prized than the hard-to-determine technical virginity. However, Anna’s ignorance was so great that she told her ladies-in-waiting that she believed her marriage had been consummated because Henry had kissed her and held her hand. She had no idea how to please the king in or out of bed. Her lack of education in languages and social intercourse—not uncommon in her Germanic home, but very different from the English court with its flirting and courtly humour and love of all things French—put her at a disadvantage and contributed to Henry’s disappointment in her, a disappointment so strong that, although he went through with the arranged marriage for diplomatic reasons, he could not beget the backup heir he so badly needed.

This is quite an interesting book, heavily sprinkled with footnotes which reassure the reader as to the authenticity of the material without interrupting the flow of the story. Sadly—for my purposes—Fraser does not have a lot to say about Cromwell, giving me nothing to set against Mantel’s picture of him. Her depictions of Henry, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn do accord well with those in Wolf Hall. And of course, it is impossible to know the full truth about someone, even a near family member, much less a man who lived almost 500 years ago. It’s hard enough to know the truth about ourselves, as Cromwell discovered near the end of Mantel’s book when he realised that he had the face of a murderer.

This Booker Award-winning novel is based on the life of Thomas Cromwell, a commoner who rose to become a trusted advisor to Henry VIII. After running away from his abusive blacksmith of a father to become a soldier, Cromwell learns accounting, diplomacy, and many languages as he moves among the capitals of the various European empires. He becomes a lawyer and eventually a protégé of the powerful Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey sets him to investigating and sometimes closing monasteries where corruption—the selling of indulgences, fathering of children, etc.—has run rampant. Cromwell is interested in the new religious reform movements, believing for example that everyone should have access to a translation of the Bible, but he has no hatred for the Catholic church, only for corrupt priests.

Most of the narrative is concerned with the period when Henry has become obsessed with Anne Boleyn. In searching for a way to marry her legitimately, he turns to Cromwell who has the extensive contacts, the balance sheet of favors given and received, and the shrewd insight to manage the people around him. By focusing on Cromwell's thoughts, plans, and feelings, we see how he manages with a delicate twitch upon the reins not only his employees and contacts, but also the Boleyn/Howard clan, the royal household, and Anne herself. A cautious man, he knows how to count the costs, how to balance his desire for revenge on those who made Wolsey’s downfall so humiliating with his recognition that today’s enemy may be tomorrow’s ally.

It is a fascinating ride, following the gradual hardening of this man, who starts out merely practical, loving learning and his family, and yet becomes the monster who haunts the history books. No single step seems so very bad. I’m reminded again of the children in The Diamond in the Window, one of the first books I discussed on this blog, and how their small choices in one game led them to quite different personalities than they expected or wanted.

Although some family trees and a cast of characters are provided, knowledge of the historical context is assumed. You don’t need to know it to enjoy the book. You can read this book simply as a novel about an interesting man and a perennially popular time period. You can read it for insight into how it is possible for someone to become as lost to human compassion as those we see in our own day prosecuting wars for their own personal benefit and inflicting torture on the powerless.

However, knowing Cromwell’s later fate as Henry struggles to rid himself of wife #4, Anna of Cleves, adds poignancy to Cromwell’s reaction to Wolsey’s downfall and to Cromwell’s attempts to bridle the king, who wants what he wants. Knowing about the later reigns of Henry’s two daughters makes their childhood influences more striking, such as Mary losing her title of Princess and being required to wait on her baby sister. Knowing the roles they will later play makes some of the minor characters more interesting, such as Anne’s musician Mark Smeaton and her pale lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour.

Cromwell’s huge accomplishment in having Henry declared head of England’s church is presented as one small step in a long string of diplomatic negotiations, as it undoubtedly was, no matter how much it may seem to us like a cataclysmic explosion. The religious controversies of the times are certainly part of this story but not the main thread, as they are with so many other novels of the times.

The strength of the book, aside from the character development, is in the details—of ordinary life as well as court life. Mantel’s research is so well integrated that it is only in retrospect that I can appreciate how extensive it must have been. Emotional detail, too, caparisons the story, as in the subtle changes in Cromwell’s relationship with Anne Boleyn and the gentle teasing from his daughters that he not only endures but cherishes. He is not a man who gives himself away; his opinions and feelings are hidden from us yet we learn to read the signs and come to understand this most complex man.

My one frustration with the book was that the dialogue is often not attributed, forcing me to go back over several pages of dialogue to untangle who said what. The pronoun “he” does not reliably refer to the last-named person, as we have been trained to expect. While this stylistic choice is consistent with Cromwell’s reticence and tendency toward self-effacement, it more than once made me throw down the book in disgust. But I always came back, wanting to immerse myself once again in the world of 16th century England and Cromwell’s ride into history.