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I wrote about Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum back in April, a first novel I enjoyed so much that I snatched up this, more recent book when I spotted it in the bookstore. Case Histories fits into the mystery genre, having a series of crimes and a detective. However, it is unlike any other mystery I’ve read and, although they haven’t often shown up on this blog, I’ve read a lot of mysteries.

What I like about mysteries, beyond the fact that some of the best writing today can be found in them (just take a look at books by people like P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Iain Pears, and Arturo Perez-Reverte), is the puzzle. Yes, I’m one of those people. I like to do crossword puzzles, though not quite so much as I did in the days when my sons were still at home and we worked them round-robin on lazy Sunday mornings in front of the fire. My sons are now trying to convert me to cryptic crosswords, but I haven’t yet done enough to recognise the patterns and cues; finding a single answer is cause for major rejoicing, and I still remember the astonished pride with which I unraveled my first clue. (“Trainee pilots tie shoes”: L+aces=laces. Okay, I never said it was a hard one.)

Atkinson’s book is not so much about the puzzle, though there are questions to be answered and deaths to be understood, as it is about the emotions. She breaks what I never before realised was a cardinal rule of mystery-writing: don’t linger too long on the grief; get busy building the resolution. No, the losses here are wrenching, and continue to distort lives decades later.

In Case No. 1, a family goes to sleep in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood and wakes up to a disappearance that changes each of their lives forever. Case No. 3 takes us inside the life of a young woman trapped by a too-quick marriage, rural isolation, and a demanding baby (whom she refers to as “the bug”), all of which combine to create the kind of desperation that leads a fox to gnaw off its own leg. Case No. 4 concerns the detective himself, and his family’s past. But it was Case No. 2 that sent me reeling: a widowed lawyer whose love for his daughter permeates his life, whose fear for her safety evokes practical defenses, such as cautioning her against blind spots, and magical thinking, such as believing a train accident had filled the day’s quota of tragedy.

One of Atkinson’s gifts as a writer is the way she brings her characters to life—I could swear I knew Ruby Lennox from Museum personally, and in my dotage I’m sure I’ll get her mixed up with my real childhood friends—but participating so fully in their emotions means feeling their confusion and anger and desolation. In each of these cases, hurt, mourning with those left to carry on, I was reminded of Julian Green’s “a chasm coming between me and my life”, the way a single event can put a full stop on what came before and thrust you irrevocably into a new and alien reality, where your only hope is to reach a separate peace. Solutions are achieved here, peace even, but it is the grief that stays with me.

Memoirs have made up a good part of my reading list over the last few years while I struggled to shape my own story. The quality has varied widely, but even the duds raise questions that interest me, such as why the author selected these scenes and ordered them in this way. Sometimes even the poorly constructed ones have a few scenes that bring a particular time and place to life, scenes that stay with me. For example, I recently read M.F.K. Fischer’s Among Friends which I found tedious for the most part. Rather than a sustained narrative, it appeared to be a random collection of anecdotes such as those intended for the sake of children or grandchildren, i.e., people who care more about the writer than the story. However, there were several lovely and memorable scenes, such as one from a childhood summer at the shore where she swims out to a rock to collect mussels for dinner.

I picked up this memoir about Patchett’s friendship with Lucy Grealy, having read nothing by either woman, but intrerested by the inside flap’s promise that “Patchett shines light on the little explored (sic) world of women’s friendships”. However, the scene describing the start of their friendship left me uneasy and skeptical. Although the two had attended Sarah Lawrence at the same time, Lucy didn’t know Ann while Ann knew Lucy only as a campus “celebrity”. Yet Lucy’s first action when they meet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is to throw herself on Ann, wrapping her arms around Ann’s neck and her legs around Ann’s waist, weeping copiously with joy that Ann has arrived.

There is a lot more weeping throughout the book as Lucy—who is also presented as outgoing and popular, with hordes of friends—continues to cling to Ann, demanding that Ann constantly acknowledge that she loves Lucy best, better than any other girlfriend, better than any boyfriend or husband. On one occasion, when the two are lunching with Ann’s new friend Elizabeth, Lucy pulls this stunt, sitting on Ann’s lap, demanding to be told Ann loves her best, eating off of Ann’s plate. Ann writes, “I was a little embarrassed, but only because I was afraid that Elizabeth might not understand Lucy, or understand me for letting her get away with it.” At that point, a third of the way through the book, I did not understand either.

I found this book deeply disturbing and not in any way representative of women’s friendships as I know them. True, the writing is beautiful and powerful. True, Lucy faced severe and uncommon trials. But, if this account is accurate (a disclaimer that must always be made about a memoir), the “friendship” between these two women was a classic addict/enabler relationship. Lucy was addicted not just to the heroin that eventually killed her but to being the center of attention always, attention that Ann and Lucy’s other friends lavished on her, along with money, food, clothes, apartments, etc. “She liked to be carried,” Ann writes.

From this account, I could see where Lucy’s incandescent personality (when she wasn’t crying) could be fun to be around. For a few minutes. However, it wouldn’t be long before I would be running like crazy in the other direction. There are some people who can never get enough attention; their neediness is like a bottomless pit inside them (as a friend of mine described it). Expecting someone to devote themselves to the Sisyphean task of trying to fill that pit goes beyond the bounds of friendship, in my opinion.

If I can get over the creepiness of the story, I will go back and try to analyze the writing itself to understand how Patchett achieves such remarkable power in her prose. And I will keep looking for a good memoir about women’s friendship.

Moving a little further north, from South Africa to Morocco, this small novel also deals with friendship and the way its currents shift and change over time. Here, though, it is not a question of power but of betrayal.

We get the story first from Ali’s viewpoint and then from Mamed’s, with a coda from the viewpoint of a mutual friend. Ali and Mamed both describe their childhood with playground bullies and teachers, their adolescence with girlfriends and prostitutes, and their later life with wives and children. A youthful brush with politics gets them arrested, and their brutal eighteen-month incarceration cements their friendship, which survives into adulthood as they move into different careers (medicine and teaching) and even different countries (Mamed moves to Sweden while Ali stays in Morocco). However, there is a subtle tension between them, a sense of things askew, which causes their friendship to fluctuate.

If all this sounds straightforward, it is. I had hoped for insight into Moroccan history and culture but got very little of that from this book. I did, however, gain insight into friendship and how it can play out over a lifetime. More importantly, the book gave me a new perspective on narrative itself.

Ben Jelloun’s style here is to tell the story rather than recreate it. Most western writers try to get the reader to experience the story along with the characters, using sensory details, absorbing characters and suspenseful plotting to engage the reader’s full participation. None of that here.

Yet, the seeming flatness of the story made me pay more attention to how it was being told. Nuances in the way the two friends related the same events suddenly took on great importance. A single adjective here, the description of an article of clothing there gave completely different meanings to a single happening. The extremely short chapters—500 words or so—also made me pay attention. The small frame, and all that was not said, highlighted what was actually on the page.

Usually I have to read a book again if I want to analyze what the writer is doing. However, here I found myself aware of the craft even as I enjoyed the art. Some people would call that a failure on the writer’s part, but I would not go so far. It’s just a different reading experience. Ben Jelloun has found an unusual way to relate two lives, a way that engaged my intellect as well as my interest.

I was quite taken by the cover of this book, a muted picture of a the corner of a shadowed room with a faintly glowing window in the darkest wall. It’s not the first time I’ve chosen a book simply because of the cover, just as I sometimes use my friend’s method of selecting wine based on whether I like the picture on the label; the uncertainty creates space for discovery.

This novel takes place in the “new” South Africa of the 1990’s where people of all races are trying to work out where they stand in the new social climate even as they struggle with resentment and reconciliation. It follows an Afrikaner woman named Marion who owns a travel agency where she has just hired Brenda, her first employee of color. Marion owns an apartment by the sea, appropriate for someone whose father has always called her his “meermin” or mermaid. Although her parents came from a “dirt-poor” background, they prospered in Cape Town, and Marion herself leads a carefully ordered and affluent life, running her business and visiting her aging father, until dreams and chaotic memories begin to disrupt her equilibrium.

I enjoyed the writing. Wicomb’s syntax is unassuming but subtly spellbinding. Many dialect words and expressions are inserted, but their meaning is clear and they are not intrusive. I found the descriptions of the interactions on the street, in the break room at the travel agency, the father’s run-down cottage, and the home of Brenda’s family powerful. However, I simply could not warm to Marion. Several times I almost abandoned the book, not so much because Marion was such a cold, solitary person, but because I could find no common point where I could engage with her.

When there is a main character I don’t like or am not interested in, there must be some compensating factor to keep me reading: a fascinating story or enthralling writing. The writing here is good, but the reason I didn’t abandon this book was the metastory, the larger issue of who holds the power in social relationships and what they do with it.

Power isn’t supposed to be a factor in a friendship, but it is. Sometimes friendships coalesce where one is the leader and the other the follower. Or friends can be experts in different fields, e.g., one knows all about music while the other is a visual artist. But the relationship doesn’t stay there. The follower matures and becomes powerful enough to challenge the leader. The artist learns more about music while the musician doesn’t look up from her score. The balance of power between two friends fluctuates, particularly in an environment such as South Africa where the power relationships between the larger societal groups are also changing.

I thought this book remarkable for taking on such an unusual and fascinating subject. For the most part, Wicomb handled it deftly. The ending was a bit of a clunker, just the last few pages—disappointing after so much lovely prose and so many nuanced insights into these characters and their relationships.

I couldn’t leave Turkey without checking into these great epics, published as Memed, My Hawk and They Burn the Thistles in English translation. They take place in the Taurus mountains, just after the first World War, when the Ottomans have been banished and all the boundaries redrawn. Mustafa Kemal has driven out the French and abolished the feudal system. However, like the carpetbaggers that swarm in after any war, a few newly rich men have started acquiring land and power, setting themselves up as aghas or lords. When the villagers could no longer be tricked out of their land, the aghas beat and tortured the holdouts or brought in brigands to burn the villagers’ homes and steal their horses.

We first meet Ince Memed, Slim Memed, as a young boy running away from home. After his father died, the local agha beat the boy and his mother and took their land, condemning them to be serfs on his land. When the agha finds Memed, he subjects him and his mother to an even greater punishment: instead of taking two-thirds of their laboriously scythed and hand-threshed wheat, the agha takes three-quarters and threatens the other villagers not to give them a single grain. Although some of their neighbors disobey the injunction, the two are left to starve until they finally surrender and give their single cow and its calf to the agha. Later, when Memed has grown, the agha takes even the youth’s fiance to be his own nephew’s bride.

Memed’s struggle against this cruel despotism leads him to the mountains to become a brigand, first joining a band that is not in the pay of an agha and then leading his own small band. Eventually he becomes a great hero to the people of all the villages, a Robin Hood who cannot be shot and who inspires some of them to fight back. Memed finds his fame a burden and, in the second novel, is plagued by a sense of futility when the agha he kills is replaced by another who is even worse. “‘Why struggle?'” he asks old Suleyman, the man who had taken him in and adopted him back when Memed had first run away. “‘It is right to struggle,'” Suleyman replies.

These novels, separately and together are great reads. In them, the elements of a novel are equally strong: the enthralling plot carried me forward like a river in spate; the complex emotions and motivations of the characters are explored in ways that are integral to the story; and the settings—the plains, the mountains, the streets of the town—are described in vivid detail: the feel of the mud sucking at your boots, the color of the thistle fields at sunset, the cold of a mountain cave in winter, the bees and butterflies and green snakes.

And behind it all the eternal theme: good versus evil, the risk and damage done to the hero who stands up, the gradual rise of an oppressed people against men whom greed has turned into tyrants. Memed compares the people to a thousand-headed dragon: “Cut off the thousand heads and a whole forest of heads emerged.”

People of Paper is not like any book I have ever seen. Clearly experimental, the text alone shows that the author wanted to play with form and meaning. I thought it would be hard to read for this reason, but in fact the story engaged my interest immediately and—for the most part—kept it as the plot unrolled. I was afraid that the gimmicks were intended to hide poor writing, but in fact the writing was quite good.

I liked the first part of the book best. It's rare to find an author who handles magical realism as well as Plascencia does, and his formal innovations only added to the fun. The story begins with an origami surgeon, a man who creates organs for transplant and then goes on to create entire people out of nothing but folded paper. All the characters were strange, yet I couldn’t help entering into their interests and cheering for them as they picked flowers and engaged in a war against Saturn. Why? Because he was looking at them.

Mid-way through, I was disappointed at finding out Saturn’s identity; the whole story suddenly seemed rather mundane and just too cute. For example, I had really liked the idea of origami surgery and didn't want it to be a simplistic metaphor. Books that leave room for my own imagination have a stronger impact on me. I also wasn’t much interested in hearing about the author’s personal issues and problems writing the book.

However, Plascencia managed to hold it together enough for me to finish the book. I liked the characters in the town best: Froggy who endured the gang initiation and became its heart, Federico who needed to sit under the shell of a mechanical tortoise in order to think, Baby Nostradamus who could hide his thoughts. I would have liked the book better if Plascencia had stuck with them instead of spelling out his metastory (and metaphors), but perhaps others will enjoy the extra layers.

Ultimately, the book is a cautionary tale about the power of stories. We can all create narratives (whether books or news articles or simply gossip), and we can also be the unwilling subjects of them. The book made me think about the power of the narrator over the subject, his/her power to intrude on other people’s privacy or inflict damage on their lives. Words can mean what we want them to, as Humpty Dumpty told Alice; all that matters is who is to be Master.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine ran away to join the circus. She went on tour with Cirque du Soleil as part of the orchestra. Not quite the traditional big top and elephant-led parade, but it reminded me of childhood fantasies of criss-crossing the country as part of a circus. Sure, I wanted to get gussied up in pink satin and ride around the ring standing on the back of a big white horse, but that wasn’t my primary motivation. Being on the road appealed to me; in another place and time, I’d have fantasized about running off with a gypsy caravan. Most of all, I wanted to hang out with the circus people. I wanted to be one of those enlightened and cynical people behind the scenes, the ones who knew all the secrets.

These books share some of those secrets. People on my maillists have been raving about Water for Elephants for months, so I picked it up and became absorbed by this story of a Depression-era circus and the young runaway who joined it. It’s framed by the story of the same man at ninety-three, stuck in a comprehensive care retirement community, “one of the ancient dusty people, filed away like some worthless tschotchke.” The two stories feed off each other; Jacob doesn’t seem to have lost much of his orneriness and hot-headed courage over the years.

Gruen’s extensive research adds depth without calling attention to itself. Period and sensory details made me feel the bite of a toothless lion, the rocking of the train underfoot, the difficulty of moving from wheelchair to walker. Some circus characters and scenes turn out to be based on those she discovered in her reading. And I was charmed by the period photographs she included.

My only quibble was with the prologue. Some people can’t stand prologues; they skip them or refuse to read a book that has one. I don’t mind them, as long as they contribute to the story and aren’t just a—to me, lazy—way of foreshadowing or starting in media res, as we’re told to do. Here, the prologue is a chunk of the climax copied and pasted in front of Chapter One. It’s confusing because we don’t know the characters or what’s going on. It’s unnecessary because Chapter One’s opening is a fine start. And—for me—it detracts from the climax when we finally get there by adding a ho-hum, been-there dimension. It did not make me curious to read on; it simply exasperated me.

However, I was able to forget about it quickly and fell so thoroughly under the spell of the story that I read it all in one go. I kept trying to put it down so I could tackle my massive to-do list but next thing I knew, there I was reading it again. It even sent me back to Toby Tyler on which the 50’s tv show Circus Boy was based. The show starred Mickey Dolenz, later one of the Monkees, as Toby.

Although my copy of the book with its brittle brown pages doesn’t show a date, I thought it must date from the era of sugar-sweet children’s stories. Maybe, but this book surprised me with its candid look behind the tent flaps. Some of the details, such as the “lemonade” made from brook water with a few lemon slices for show, were similar to Gruen’s book (hers was a little worse: trough water with the straw filtered out). Certainly the idea was the same: circus people are like any other group of people, a mixture of kind, generous folks and cruel bullies. Even so, there are still days when running away to join the circus seems to me like a great idea.

Continuing the Turkish theme—and indeed there is a cat named Pamuk and a minor character named Orhan—my book club selected this novel about Turkey during the early 20th century. We had enjoyed a good discussion of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin a few years ago, so hoped for good things from this new novel.

The first half makes a good beach book, with its short chapters, so vibrant and humorous. In a mosaic of self-contained anecdotes, de Bernieres builds up a portrait of a small town on the southern coast of what is now Turkey, many of whose colorful characters have nicknames that reflect their professions (e.g., Iskander the Potter, Mehmet the Tinsman) or perceived characteristics (e.g., Lydia the Barren, Ali the Broken-Nosed). Muslims and Christians all consider themselves Ottomans, and there is no religious strife. In fact, they sometimes give offerings in each other’s traditions, saying they wanted to back both horses. De Bernieres is an excellent writer, and each scene is deeply imagined and brought to life with sensual detail that delights.

If there is a serious thread in the beginning, it is of misogyny, women as property or pets that must be put down when they misbehave. As the story progresses, we see this attitude applied to those of particular ethnic backgrounds, such as Armenians, and other scapegoats, such as the unpopular local activist and teacher. We see people’s foolishness and cruelty when gathered together into a group. There was much written about mob psychology after WWII, trying to make sense of the Holocaust. This town is too small for the people to be anonymous in their mob, but, like eighth-graders in the hallway, they cannot resist egging on a fight or joining in the persecution of the day’s victim. And de Bernieres reminds us of the many other holocausts that led up to and followed the Great War.

Once the war starts, the story gets serious. We spend several chapters at Gallipoli, up to now well-documented from the Australian side, but here we see it from the Turkish side, through the eyes of one of the young men of the town. The vivid writing and sensual details that made the first half of the book so delightful here bring home the horror and occasional joy of war.

The brief chapters about Mustafa Kemal that were interpolated into the first half of the book now expand into longer narratives about the progress of the war, the various political factions in the country, and the War of Independence with Greece that followed the Great War. Although well-written and engaging, this part of the book is essentially a nonfiction summary of the political and military context. I found these sections unnecessary to the story, but perhaps my opinion is skewed because I had recently read several books about Ataturk and the end of the Ottoman empire.

In fact, by the time the story returns to the town in the final pages, I found I had lost interest in the characters and their dilemmas. Even the promised climax seemed rather flat to me, and the story trailed off. But perhaps that is the point. Even for those who survive, war destroys the quality of their lives. Nothing is the same afterwards. Poppies may grow over the mass graves in Gallipoli, but the longing to return home is never satisfied.

Sometimes I wonder why we even need stories. Reading (or watching) stories can be a distraction, just another way of filling up time. I’ve stopped listening to books on tape while I walk my usual 3-5 miles a day, in order to pay better attention to what’s around me, though I still listen to them in the car.

Yet I’ll never give up my addiction to stories. For me, it is not so much the surrogate thrill of an adventure story or the satisfaction of solving a mystery story’s puzzle—though I enjoy both—as it is the sense of being taken out of my life. Occasionally it’s just a relief to escape for a while from the endless story of me, but more often I actively want to be someplace else—Turkey or Antarctica—or I want to know what it is like to be someone else—an immigrant from Jamaica or an English student gone walkabout (or boat-about). As if I were an actor able to play many roles on stage, reading gives me the chance to experience alternative lives and bring back the lessons I’ve learned.

These stories of Jean McGarry’s are not so much about home as they are about family. They bring to life childhood and the way siblings relate to each other. “The Calling” reminded me of the nicknames, teasing and insults; as well as the underlying connection. I also particularly liked the subtlety of “Mr. and Mrs. Bull” where a woman visits her aunt and uncle for the first time in ten years, and we only gradually realise the great gift she has been given.

The stories are deeply imagined and precise, using the right details to create their world. Most of them are set in or near Providence. I recently spent several weeks in New England, reconnecting with old friends, wandering through small towns and rural routes, avoiding the fancy Boston bars and pilgrim re-enactors. I was overwhelmed by the number of ponds opening beside the road, ponds that sparkled under the sun, their ruff of pine trees dark and mysterious.

New England always seemed reticent and withdrawn to me. However, on this trip, I was surprised by how friendly everyone was: the gas station attendant who regaled me with the saga of a thunderstorm earlier in the day; the shop clerk wanted to chat about the relative merits of Carver and Plymouth; another who (though half my age) wanted to know all about my plans for the night; the young waiter who stayed to chat after taking my order, convinced he had waited on me before, even as the table of laughing girls called for him to come back and hang out with them.

Many of McGarry’s stories capture that defiant New England sadness that fills towns from Pawtucket to Barre, a hopelessness that is offset—buoyed somehow—by a feisty harshness, a determination to get by. The routes I traveled revealed vegetable stands with hand-painted signs and backyard body shops where men with tattooed arms lifted fenders and swung mallets. McGarry’s stories of families and communities struggling not to dissolve made me sad, until I recognised the network of connections that underlay them, like veins under the skin, tough fibers that would not give up their hold.

I tried to read this classic mystery once before, when I was a teenager, and stopped after about fifty pages. It seemed that the story was going nowhere and—worse—seemed overly bogged down with descriptive passages. I was just coming off of The Sound and the Fury and Portrait of a Lady both of which I loved, so thought I was up to the challenge of heavy-duty prose. I just couldn't get interested in the story.

However, I'm glad I picked it up again. What a great read! Pieces of the brilliantly puzzling plot are doled out at just the right time to sustain the suspense. And the suspense is not the sickening car-chase kind that makes your adrenaline sing. It is the quiet, persistent, growing suspense that develops organically from the story.

One evening in July 1859, a drawing master, Walter Hartright, was walking home to London from visiting his mother. Just after he crossed Hampstead Heath, he encountered a woman dressed all in white who was in some distress and begged him to help her reach London. As they walked along, he mentioned that he was about to take up a post in Cumberland. She told him of a happy time in her life when Mrs. Fairlie of Limmeridge House was particularly kind to her, much to his astonishment, since Limmeridge House was precisely where he was headed.

This meeting and circumstances around it raise questions in Hartright's mind, questions which multiply and take on new significance as the plot unfolds. The story is told in first person, moving from Hartright's narrative to the journal of a woman, to various depositions given by characters at the appropriate moment. These shifts in point of view are handled very well. Each is justified and explained by the story. Moreover, they are clearly labeled and the voice of each varied appropriately for the character speaking. And having the character himself or herself actually provide the information gives it an immediacy and authenticity which would be missing in a second-hand recounting.

Mystery writers would do well to study Collins' technique, not just the way he handles voice and shifting points of view, but the way his characters are presented and allowed to shift and change over time in ways that seem perfectly natural. And, of course, the means he employs to create and sustain the reader's interest.