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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like Dave Anderton in Be Near Me the main character of this book must find the path that is uniquely his own through a bewildering number of dualities. As a recently unmasked Soviet spy, Victor Maskell knows about loyalties and betrayals, his life doubled not just between countries, but between wife and lovers, between the friends who have supported and duped him. A bewilderingly complex character, Maskell has worked in British intelligence and served as an art expert to the queen, whom he clearly admires. He is an expert on Poussin and treasures the objets d'art in his museum and his flat.

Maskell, of course, is loosely based on Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge spies. Characters based on Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean also fill this fictionalised recounting of their recruitment as Russian spies in the 1930s, their long careers as double agents, and their eventual discovery. But it is Maskell whose consciousness we inhabit.

In the wake of his public disgrace, Maskell agrees to a series of interviews with a young journalist, Miss Vandaleur, and he is quickly lost in memories of the past, regardless of whether she is present or not. This absobing narrative takes us from his childhood in Ireland through his university years when he meets the men who become his friends (and, in some cases, co-conspirators), through the war years, and on up to the present.

Banville has said that this book, like so many of his other books, is about the quest for authenticity. For a double agent, there can be no more difficult task. If you lie all the time to everyone, how do you know when you are telling the truth? Every relationship in Maskell's life is fraught with the possibility of betrayal, be it on his part or on the other person's. His confusion and self-deceptions are wrenching, as are his devotions. As he followed his path to the best of his understanding, he leaves behind him the wreckage of the lives of people he has had to hurt: his family, his wife, his lovers.

I don't feel that I can do this book justice in a brief review. It's only recently that I've discovered Banville's work. Perhaps I'm still too close to this story to analyse why it grabbed me right away and wouldn't let up, why I became so addicted to Maskell's voice and to the story of those times. It was different, then, in the 1930s. Communism, fascism . . . I don't think I ever understood before how such a choice could be made, how young men so privileged with the best that England had to offer could choose to spy for Russia, could choose Stalin over the West, despite its flaws. Now, though, with these men who seem so real to me however fictionalised, it begins to make sense.

I wasn't at all sure I wanted to read this book, despite having enjoyed O'Hagan's contributions to the London Review of Books for years. Looking at my towering TBR pile with its many intriguing alternatives, I couldn't summon up much interest in the troubles of a Catholic priest in a small Scottish town. However, as we are told in writing classes, it is the job of the author to make us want to read his or her book and to teach us how to read it, so clutching my faith in this author's talents I plunged in.

The prologue and first chapter didn't grab me. Dialogue-heavy, they left me grasping after dramatic action, some physical movement or manifestation to rock my imagination awake. What is happening here? I thought. And yet, almost without realising it, I was captivated by the witty repartee, the unexected turns of character, the questions subtly raised and left hanging. Understanding finally that this book required a different kind of attention, I read on and ended up enjoying the book tremendously. More, I was left thinking about the contradictions in those around us, and the necessary conflict between the way they see us and how we see ourselves.

Father David Anderton, although born in Scotland, has been brought up in England. After many mildly successful years in a Blackpool parish, he has asked for a transfer to Scotland in order to be near his mother in her old age. In addition to his church duties, he conducts services at St. Andrew's school along with occasional classes in World Religions. At the school he jousts with the Head of Music and becomes friendly with some of the students, particularly Mark and Lisa.

O'Hagan does an excellent job of capturing the voices of the young people; David's middle-aged and overeducated syntax; and the individual tones of townspeople, teachers and other priests. He also does an excellent job of contrasting the various cultures, particularly in capturing the amoral, self-centered world of the teens. Some passages left me shaking with laughter and recognition.

What I found so fascinating here is that the story doesn't go where I thought it would, and the characters don't behave as I thought they would. I was totally bemused by the complexity and surprise of the unfolding story.

It is the surprise that I want to revisit. There is something in the way that the author handles time in this book that makes the flow of the story seamless. Much of the narrative has to do with David's past: his Lancashire father, the years in a Yorkshire prep school, Oxford in the tumultuous 1960s, going to Rome and the decisions he made there. Yet O'Hagan builds up to each of these transitions so carefully, sprinkling just enough oblique references to make the memory, when it finally comes, seem the most natural thing in the world.

Finally, one of the questions that interested me in this novel was how you hang on to your sense of yourself in the face of other people's opinions. David seems to incur distrust and dislike from people around him on so many points: his English background, his Catholicism, his taste for French wine, his erudition. Questions about authenticity seem to lie behind many of the exchanges. Ultimately, this story seems less about religious life in the modern age than about faith in a larger sense, faith in the past and your choices and other people.

Like most readers, I usually despise films made from books that I've loved. Most of the time, they are ruined by the cuts necessary to compress a book into a two-hour film, not to mention the distortions added by studios in search of blockbusters, like the smooch scene added to the end of the version of Pride and Prejudice that came out a few years ago. There are always exceptions, of course, like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but they are rare.

So I wasn't sure I wanted to see this film. I usually dislike McEwan’s characters but always admire his writing. And Atonement is a masterpiece. I couldn’t bear to think of it being ruined by a film. One of the things that I particularly liked about this book was that the conflict, the violence came from within the family, instead of from some diabolus ex machina dropped in to jumpstart the plot.

My book club talked forever about this book, caught up in its ambiguities. We compared notes on the possibility of atoning for things you have done from the perspectives of our different religious backgrounds and from our own experiences. We discussed redemption and how it differed from atonement.

Several people disliked the first section of the book, when Briony is a child, complaining that it was florid and overwritten. As most people already know, she happens to see a scene involving her older sister and a young man. Briony's misinterpretation of the scene has tragic consequences. The second section follows the young man as a soldier in the Great War, while the third section deals with the years just after the war, when Briony and her sister are both nurses in London. A brief final section is set in the present.

The style of each section is markedly different. It seemed to me—and this was my defense to my clubmates—that McEwan deliberately wrote the sections in styles reflecting the literary styles of the period in which they are set. The first section, the idyllic country house and family life, seemed to me like the romanticism of some Georgian literature, Rupert Brooke's poetry for example. The Great War section was written in the gritty realist style of Graves or Owen, while the immediate post-war years section reminded me of “angry young men” such as John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe. The final section, of course, is pure post-modernism, playing games with the narrative and structure.

Well, I'm just a reader and experts in lit crit will undoubtedly find my summary laughable, but I still think the progression of literary styles in Atonement is remarkable. The film, despite the necessary elisions, manages to preserve these differences while crafting a coherent story. Well done, I say.

I followed the Barnes book with another story about a search for a stuffed bird. No post-modern dictionaries or bestiaries here, simply good writing. No choppy sentences or jump cuts between characters, just good story-telling. I was completely enthralled by this book, racing through it and, yes, caring deeply about all the characters, heroes and villains alike.

The bird in question here is the Mysterious Bird of Ulieta. The naturalist on Captain Cook's second voyage to the South Seas brought back this stuffed bird, the only one of its kind ever seen, and presented it to Joseph Banks, who had been the naturalist on Cook's first voyage. Then it disappeared. So much is true. Two hundred years later, the chase is on to find this valuable specimen.

As in Byatt's Possession two storylines are intertwined, one in the present and one in the past. Davies does an excellent job of maintaining the focus in each and switching from one to the other without losing this finicky reader. In the present, we follow Fitz, a taxidermist and lapsed conservationist, and his young student boarder, Katya, as they race to find the bird before two other groups, who both intend to sell it to a pharmaceutical company planning to pull the bird apart in order to copyright its DNA. In the 1770s, we follow Joseph Banks himself as he struggles to weave together the different threads of his life: the woman he loves, the renown he wants, and the work he cannot relinquish.

Without spinning it out unnecessarily Davies gives each scene the time and space it needs to develop fully. Thus, he makes each scene so intense, so vivid, that thinking of them is like remembering my own past. And, as in the Barnes book, Davies is concerned with what we can make of the shreds of the past. And with where we run out of ways to knot them together, leaving them to fall apart in our hands.

Curious as to why it only took one paragraph for me to be fascinated with Fitz, I went back to the beginning. I already knew he was a taxidermist from the chapter heading, so wasn't surprised to find him working on a dead owl, but intrigued, certainly. The description of the December evening, the heat from the lamp, the feel of the skull and the skin made it seem as though I were there in the room with him. I felt Fitz's cautious elation when his difficult task seemed to be working and his irritation when the phone's ringing interrupted him. Remembering the practical jokes callers often pull on him, he decides not to answer it, only to change his mind out of concern that it might be Katya's mother trying to reach her.

So, what do we have here? His obvious competence at and concern for his work put me on his side immediately—I love reading about people at work—but it was his consideration for Katya and her mother that made me like him. The sensory descriptions and touch of humor pulled me into the scene, and the questions raised (Why is someone calling a taxidermist late at night? Who is Katya? Will the owl be ruined?) pushed me to read on.

And read I did. I'll certainly be looking for more books by this author.

Enough bad books! I knew I could count on Julian Barnes and he did not let me down. I waited to read this book until I had read the Flaubert novelette upon which it was based. Un Coeur Simple is the story of a servant who despite her low position in life and the many losses she endures, maintains her placid ways and her love for those around her. She also maintains her faith, although towards the end she gets a little mixed up and prays to a stuffed parrot given her by a neighbor, as well as to the more traditional Catholic god. After all, she reasons, the Holy Spirit is shown as a dove, so why not a parrot?

The Barnes book is a first-person narrative by Geoffrey Braithwaite, a pedantic doctor whose interest in Flaubert leads him into a search for the actual stuffed parrot that sat on Flaubert's desk as he wrote the story.

First off, hurray! One main character, with layers and layers of complexity to unpack, even if he does talk more about Flaubert than about himself. Secondly, this is one smart book. Not just the details about Flaubert's life and works, but the way they are presented and woven into the narrator's life. By an odd coincidence, I had just finished reading the wonderful Henry James Goes to Paris by Peter Brooks which is about Flaubert's influence on James, well, Maupassant, Zola and Balzac, too, but mostly Flaubert, so I had just been thinking about the relevance of his stories to the way we live—and write—today.

In his final, unfinished book Bouvard et Pecuchet Flaubert stepped beyond the realistic narrative he helped develop and began to play with the structure of the book in a way we would now describe as post-modernist. Similarly, Barnes intersperses chapters of straight-forward narration (though brimming with allusions, of which I barely caught a fraction) with chapters of lists, chronologies, a dictionary, even a bestiary. And yet, amazingly, these games move the story forward, while making me want to laugh and cry from one sentence to the next.

And what is the story? Ostensibly, Braithwaite is trying to determine which of two stuffed parrots was Flaubert's, the one at the Hotel-Dieu in Rouen, where Flaubert spent his childhood and his father practiced medicine, or the one at the museum at Croisset, where Flaubert went to live with his niece at the end of his life. However, Braithwaite is constantly second-guessing himself and his motives. He undercuts his own research into Flaubert, with debates about the value of learning about the writer's life. “Why aren't the books enough?” he asks.

But this book is really about the difficulty of capturing the past. For all his research and reading, his placing of one detail against the next, there is really no way for Braithwaite to know for sure what happened or what someone was thinking. The same handful of facts can be shuffled and made to produce multiple, quite different storylines. Also, a new discovery can change everything, such as finding that the kind of cab used for Emma Bovary's seduction was actually so tiny that such a scene would have been awkward and ludicrous.

Braithwaite's attempt to sort out and understand Flaubert's history turns out to be the method he has chosen to understand—if not recapture—his own past. I found his quest profoundly moving. This is a book I will read again and again.

This book was so tedious that I would have abandoned it after a couple of chapters if it hadn't been my book club's selection for the month. The writing style wasn't bad—many of her sentences and images were quite good—but the book simply had no content. The story follows a group of whiney, self-centered young people who, despite their privileged lives, complain constantly. The story also follows their parents, who have been fingered as the villains of the piece by the author and the young people themselves. Even though the parents have fallen over themselves giving these spoiled children everything, sent them to Ivy League schools and in some cases continued to cook for them and do their laundry even though the “children” are almost thirty years old, still it must be the parents' fault that these children are not happy. Obviously.

Last week I wrote about making the reader care about the characters, saying that it helped if they were likeable, but that it was not necessary. If this author had set out to write a book that ensured I would not care about her characters, she could not have done a better job.

For one thing, no, I could not like this bunch of drama queens. For another, there were seven equally main characters, with each chapter flipping point of view between them. If you don't stay with characters for more than a few pages, how can the reader get to know them? How can the author dig deeply enough into any one character to present any depth or complexity, any nuance? And that's another thing: in this gaggle of main characters, there wasn't a single one who was more than a superficial stereotype: daughter of famous man who fears she can't measure up, pompous middle-aged daddy having affair with young girl, uncomplaining earth mother who loves hubby despite all, effeminate and promiscuous homosexual man, confused 20-year-old in search of identity.

So much for characterization. As for plot, well, there was a lot of yakking about love affairs and wanting to be special. There were a couple of books and some articles being written, a magazine being prepared. Ho-hum. To manufacture a climax, the author had to drag in the attack on the World Trade Center, not that it was anything more than a backdrop to the lives of these self-centered characters. Who cares if thousands of people die? The important thing is that hubby goes back to earth mother, the magazine launch is OBE, and the 20-year-old leaves town.

Perhaps the author is right and most New Yorkers did react to the attacks on the World Trade Center, not with concern for those who died or for the first responders who put their lives at risk, but with selfish, melodramatic glee: Maybe I knew someone who died! Oh, poor me! Everybody pay attention to me!

I would hate to think that.

It's rare for me to say that a book isn't worth the paper it is printed on, but this one sure isn't. Some people in my book club enjoyed it, although (as one said) it was like reading a tabloid. Someone who used to work in publishing said that the author's descriptions were perfect and only too true. Another member of the book club thought it might be a spoof on the New York publishing industry, but we agreed that it wasn't funny enough for that, citing The Devil Wears Prada as a good example of an industry spoof. Another person suggested that the book itself was a spoof, that the author set out to write a ridiculously terrible book that would not only be published (because it was about the New York publishing industry itself), but also get excellent reviews and become a best-seller. If that was her intent, then she certainly succeeded. What a waste of time.

I found Water for Elephants an enjoyable read (see this blog, 2 July 2007), so I checked out Gruen's earlier book. After a prologue-like chunk of back-story, the book starts out like a bad sitcom: within the first few pages, the heroine has lost her job, discovered that her teenaged daughter is on the verge of being expelled from school, and been abandoned by her husband. Unfortunately, this heroine's surliness and self-absorption made me think all of these events justified and placed my sympathies exclusively with the other characters who had to put up with her.

She has also been informed that her father, whom she hasn't seen in years, has ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), so she collects her daughter and heads to her parents' riding school, determined to take over and run it. Mired in self-pity and arrogance, she quickly brings the school to bankruptcy. The worst kind of daughter, she is still (at 38) stuck in a teenager's rebellion. The worst kind of parent, she undercuts her own attempts to discipline her daughter, giving the girl treats when she misbehaves. And this woman, who apparently doesn't understand the first thing about rewards and punishments and has no self-discipline, is supposed to be a whiz at training horses?

The descriptions of horses and riding are the best things about this book. However, the heroine's self-centered and destructive behavior made me dislike her so much that I found myself hoping more horrible things would happen to her so that she would start acting like an adult instead of a spoiled teenager. Sadly, that never happened, turning her eventual triumph into a disappointment, for me anyway.

While this book was ruined for me by my intense dislike of the heroine, it is not impossible to have a central character whom the reader dislikes but cares about anyway. An example for me is Snowman in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake whose trials moved me although he wasn't particularly likeable (see this blog, 5 November 2007). I couldn't help rooting for him as he navigated his peculiar world.

This whole business of how to encourage a reader to care about a character is fascinating to me. Obviously readers are more likely to care about a character they like and sympathise with, but even that simplistic formula has its variables. I've been surprised, discussing books with friends and book clubs, how often we've disagreed about the main character. For example, one of my friends named the narrator of Truth and Beauty whom I found both creepy and dishonest (see this blog, 6 August 2007) as the character she had admired and cared about most deeply. Another detested Jane Eyre, who remains one of my favorites. More on this subject another time.

Thinking about the effects of global warming, the loss of open land to suburban McMansions, and the widening gap between rich and poor can be depressing. However, this series of essays is curiously hopeful. As always, McKibbon has the numbers to back up his descriptions of the challenges we face, but here he gives us possible solutions, things you and I can do.

He uses the term “deep economy” to echo the term “deep ecology” which urged a more cohesive look at environmental issues. Instead of just enacting some new law to limit emissions, “deep ecology” looked at the way we live our lives and what choices we can make that will cause more fundamental changes and improvements. Similarly, McKibbon urges us to think beyond the usual statistics economists love—GNP, growth, stock markets—and instead look at measures of human satisfaction.

Like most people, I feel overwhelmed and powerless when I try to think about the problems mentioned above. Therefore, I was thrilled by McKibbon's vivid descriptions of solutions—small-scale, to be sure, but solutions nonetheless. And when he starts talking about communities—building them, strengthening them, looking to them for answers—well, he is singing my song. Moving toward a more local economy just makes sense for everyone: business owners, workers and consumers.

The chapter that may be most familiar to people is on eating food grown locally. Where I live, we are lucky to have several farmers' markets and, during the season, many independent roadside truck stands. I have been going to one farmers' market for over twenty years. Many of the vendors are the same. It's been a joy to me to watch my fruit guy's children grow up and my vegetable lady's business expand. The flower lady, who loved my dog, grieved with me when the dog succumbed to old age. Writing in this blog about A Brief History of the Dead I said that if I were ever to win an award, the first people I would want to thank would be all the folks who enrich my life and make it possible by fixing my car, making pizza, etc.

These, too, are people who are part of my community and decades of interaction, of watching their children grow up, have made them precious to me, as precious as my friends and dancing partners, my poetry chums and book club pals. At this time of year, we look to our families but also take time to socialise. I just want to take this moment to celebrate all the people in my life. Thank you. Read this book.

I picked up this book because I’ve enjoyed other books by this author, but perhaps that says more about me than about his writing. His World War I trilogy fell into my hands just as I was reading everything I could find—poetry, history, memoirs—about that time. And I came across The Fatal Englishman the year that my bedside table was stacked with books about Antarctica: Cherry-Garrard’s memoir, Scott’s journals.

Human Traces was more of a challenge. It is the story of two men, Jacques Rebiere and Thomas Midwinter who decide to devote their lives to the study of mental illness in the hopes of understanding and curing the diseases afflicting Jacques’s brother and others. We first meet the two men in 1876 when they are 16, and follow their story, and the entwined stories of their wives, children, patients, and co-workers for the next 45 years, through the ambitions and dreams of youth, the disappointments and shortcomings of midlife, the reflections and griefs of age.

Faulks writes well. He made me care about his characters and what happened to them even though I have little interest in the Victorian period or in the early days of psychology. He writes well enough to keep me reading no matter how annoyed I get. And I did get very annoyed with this book.

For one thing, it seemed just too long. Did we really need the full text of speeches and letters, pages and pages quoting a scientific paper, long lectures about the latest discovery? It seemed like padding to me, as I waded through it, and I kept wishing he would get on with the story. Yet I kept reading.

For another thing, the story, the plot itself, was a bit thin. Every time a conflict threatens to emerge—such as when Thomas’s sister falls in love with Jacques and decides to marry him against her parents’ wishes—the potential unpleasantness falls apart like mist, and everyone is happy after all. The experimental cable car works without a hitch; a wealthy sponsor appears when the men need money for their sanatorium; an affair is forgiven with the husband not even realising the wife knows about it.

Gradually, however, it became clear that the plot was not really about such things as money and marriage. Instead, it was about ideas: the conflict between ideas and theories of how the human mind works, how it malfunctions, how to fix it. The late 19th century was the time, as well, of Darwin and the conflict between ideas of science and religion, when people debated just what separated humans from apes.

And so, by the end of the book, I was grateful for every lecture, every scientific paper, every tedious debate. Because, by the time I turned the last page, I did feel that I had learned something new about what it means to be a human being.