Permanent Rose

Other Jenny put me on to these books about the Casson family, by Hilary McKay, some time ago. By now, after I’ve finished the third book in the series, I’m a complete convert: I’m at the point where I’m trying to get other people to read them, often by buying them the first in the series (Saffy’s Angel) and sending them off to a corner to begin it.

What makes them so wonderful? This is a family with an elastic sense of what “family” means: in the first book, Saffy’s friend Sarah becomes inseparable from the Cassons; in the second, Indigo brings in his troublemaking American friend Tom; in Permanent Rose, it’s David, an awkward reformed bully. Other members of the “family” are held more loosely, it seems, but never quite let go: the eldest sister Caddy is engaged to “darling Michael,” but she has an address book full of the names of former beaux, so she won’t forget them. Even their caddish father, Bill, has scarpered off to London with a new girlfriend, but has left a Post-It note on the fridge: ANYTIME DARLINGS LOVE DADDY XXOO.

So what, then, does family loyalty mean when you have such a large definition of family? Eight-year-old Rose has been waiting all summer to hear from Tom, who left for America at the end of the last book. The rest of the family has more or less given up on him, but Rose, despite her misery, won’t hear of it. She refuses to make friends with David — to let him into the family — despite his obvious good will, because he was once cruel to Tom and Indigo. And she tries to keep other members of the family from drifting away, as well, using her own stubborn backward logic. McKay is wonderful at looking at funny situations and sad ones, irrational and rational fears, misunderstandings and real, deep comprehension that can only come through love, and striking at the truth of the matter.

One more thing I loved about this book in particular. Rose is the real artist of the family — more so than either of her parents, both of whom earn a living as artists — but she seems to have some kind of learning disability with reading. (Her mother is loving but terminally absent-minded and her father is mostly just absent; I doubt either one of them would have noticed.) Some of the book is devoted to teaching Rose that books have a use after all: they can bring beauty into your mind and teach you about people, even if you have trouble reading them yourself. McKay does it beautifully, and I am always a sucker for triumphs involving reading.

I’ve really enjoyed these novels so far, and I’m looking forward to giving them to my own children (and to reading more of them, myself.) Have any of you read any of McKay’s books that are not about the Casson family? Are they any good?

The Book of Night Women

I read The Book of Night Women by Marlon James a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been putting off writing about it — not because I don’t have anything to say, but because it’s such an interesting and complex book that I feared I wouldn’t do it justice. If I begin to ramble, go read Teresa’s review from 2011, and certainly, certainly read the book: it speaks very well for itself.

The novel begins with the birth of Lilith, “a black baby wiggling in blood on the floor with skin darker than midnight but the greenest eyes anybody ever done see.” Lilith is a slave on Montpelier Estate on Jamaica in 1785. As the narrator says, “every negro walk in a circle,” and by the time she is fourteen, Lilith becomes a house slave. Here she experiences and witnesses torments I cannot even begin to imagine — beatings, rapes, torture, abuse, the destruction of family and of self. But she also forms connections — a different sort of family — and finds a strange kind of love, and becomes unthinkably stronger.

This combination of terrible negatives and undeniable positives is the great strength of The Book of Night Women. The plot (an intricate plan of subversion, overthrow, revenge, and eventual bitter chaos) is well done, but it’s almost beside the point. What James does in this novel is to reject binary representations — black/white; master/ slave; good/ bad — and to represent the milieu of slavery, for everyone involved, with as much complexity as he can. There is no doubt whatsoever that slavery is evil: the reduction of a human being to chattel can be nothing else. The way its corrupting influence appears, however, and to what extent it can be resisted or embraced, makes fascinating reading.

Take, for instance, the contempt and cruelty with which Humphrey Wilson, master of Montpelier, and his overseers treat the slaves. The smallest infraction is answered with lashings, torture, and other punishments that are often fatal; every interaction is fraught with the intimate knowledge that Humphrey can bring pain and death on a whim. You might suspect, in a less complex book, that the slaves would unite against the white master, and join hands in fellow-feeling. Not so. The house slaves feel superior to the field slaves; the women feel superior to the men; the men feel superior to the women; women with seniority hiss insults at women lower in the hierarchy than they are. Every lash, every insult the master hands out finds its way down the line in the form of loss of dignity, loss of self, hatred of the master, of course, but also hatred of self and others who have no dignity and who submit to force majeure. It’s poisonous and crippling, and James portrays it painfully and brilliantly.

No one is only contemptible, only wise; only cruel. Humphrey loves his mother and weeps for days over her grave before committing an unimaginable atrocity; Homer, a slave, is brave and witty and kind, and she wants to kill all the white people on the plantation, even the children. It is significant, too, that James avoids binaries in his characters’ ancestry as well as their motivations. Everyone is mixed. Lilith’s father’s identity is a mystery for most of the novel, but her eyes are green. Robert O’Quinn, the overseer, is Irish, as contemptible to some of the British as a slave. Isobel, Humphrey’s lover, claims she has the West Indies in her blood, and she knows far more about island beliefs and customs than she should as a proper white woman. And of course, there are the names: the slaves on Montpelier are all given the names of Greek figures — Homer, Andromeda, Tantalus, Callisto, Pallas. All but Lilith, the first wife of Adam. The strange mix of antiquity and origin and destiny mingle in the book; I’d have to read it again to trace the precise ways James follows these paths.

As you may have seen from the tiny snippets of quotations I’ve used, James writes the book entirely in dialect, or at least nonstandard English. It’s a risky choice, but in the end it works very well. The voice of the narrator is powerful and matter-of-fact, and the shift into this not-quite-standard language slowed me down as a reader and made me take in scenes I might otherwise have skimmed over. This points up one of the strong messages of the text: that reading and writing are tools of transcendence. Homer teaches Lilith to read, using Joseph Andrews as a textbook (it’s one of the few times genuine laughter appears in the book):

Lilith begin to see how reading and writing work and how you can write a thing and give it to a nigger and nobody can hear what she say even if could only write that t-h-e-b-l-a-c-k-c-a-t-s-i-t-o-n-t-h-e-m-a-t. Writing be silent talking and Lilith like to have something that nosy niggers can’t overhear. But more so every time Lilith learn a word the cellar seem not so dark.

Later, near the end of the book, Joseph Andrews reappears and Lilith passes on her knowledge, how to read but especially of how to write.

That was the most forbidden of thing and it still be so, but there be no man, black or white, that can stop her now. But she didn’t teach me for me but for her, for when it’s time to write her song she have somebody true to be her witness.

This book is a witness — witness to the idea that when we live in injustice, we perpetrate it, and when we escape it, we do better. It was a very painful book to read — it reminded me in some ways of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World — and it took a lot of authorial risks. I’m so glad Teresa had me read it, and I hope you’ll be interested enough to read it too.

Frozen in Time

“Greenland makes no sense,” writes author Mitchell Zuckoff in Frozen in Time. For one thing, it’s not green at all. More than 80 percent of Greenland is buried in ice. For centuries, the massive island has remained largely empty. During World War II, however, this ice-filled bowl surrounded by drifting glaciers became an important field of operations. The United States established bases there to protect the island from the Germans because whoever controlled Greenland could obtain valuable early indications of weather patterns in Europe as well as a mineral used in the construction of warplanes. Greenland was important, but its climate made it dangerous. Flying across the island was sometimes described as “flying in milk,” and if a plane went down, rescue was difficult.

This book chronicles the failed rescue attempts that resulted from the November 1942 crash of a cargo plane on a routine mission from Reykjavík to a U.S. base in Greenland. A B-17 bomber en route to England that was reassigned to the rescue mission crashed just a few days later. Then, a Grumman Duck that found and rescued some of the men from the B-17 became lost in a storm. In 2012, Zuckoff took part in a mission to find that lost amphibious plane.

The story Zuckoff writes alternates between that of the men lost in the frozen Arctic and that of the modern-day searchers. It’s evident from the start that some of the lost men will survive—the level of detail in the narrative requires access to some firsthand stories—but Zuckoff carefully avoids revealing who will make it and when they will be rescued. The hidden crevasses and shifting glaciers keep the men in constant danger of falling miles into the ice—far beyond any hope of rescue. Drops of food could keep them from starving, but those life-saving packages might themselves fall into crevasses. Fresh clothes and dry socks are helpful, but no amount of additional clothing could completely protect them from the long-term damage of frostbite. And even if their physical needs are taken care of, being isolated for months with so little control of their own fate puts a near-impossible mental strain on these men.

When compared with the harrowing and intense tale of the 1940s crash survivors, the present-day story seems like a distraction, particularly early on when most of the chapters focus on the quest for funds. It’s hard to get excited about meetings and paperwork when the other chapters describe men whose feet are literally getting frozen off. Zuckoff wisely spends more time on the historical story in the first half of the book, only gradually shifting focus to the more recent story. When the more recent story moves onto the ice, it gets more exciting, although, as dangerous as the quest is, it doesn’t have the life-or-death stakes that the men in the 1940s faced. But Zuckoff holds back just enough about the results of the quest to keep readers in suspense about its outcome.

I liked Zuckoff’s previous book, Lost in Shangri-La, quite a lot, and, aside from the sometime tedium of the present-day narrative,  I think I enjoyed this even more. Cold-weather survival stories get to me, and this is a good one.

The Hidden

When Ben Mercer arrives in Greece, he’s escaping the flaming ruins of his marriage. He’s a classically trained Cambridge scholar (“Class-Anth,” he says later), but he takes a job at a meat grill in Metamorphosis, a suburb of Athens. There, we get the sense, he would have let himself sink into the routine of work and grease and burns, possibly forever, if he hadn’t run across a former colleague, Eberhard Sauer, who tells him about a dig in Laconia, the modern-day location of ancient Sparta. This news lights up Ben’s mind like those Hollywood spotlights, and despite Eberhard’s clear discouragement, he makes his way to the dig.

There, he finds… well, strata, which is what you find on an archaeological dig, right? He finds the work being carried on by Eberhard, two women (both cool and beautiful, natch), a truculent Georgian, and a nastily talkative Englishman. Ben has always been fascinated by Sparta, the severity of its ethos as well as the lack of its physical remains, and at first the sheer delight of being in ancient Lacedaemonia is enough. But Ben soon realizes that the tight-knit group is holding him at arm’s length for a reason. His desperate need to belong with them mixes uneasily with his slow realization that they are hiding something more than their obvious admiration of the Crypteia, the Spartans’ elite group of killers who hid in the hills and came out at night to assassinate helots in order to instill terror in their subjects. (The Crypteia, of course, means the Hidden.)

Ben himself, of course, is more helot than Spartan. (The Spartans were all warriors; helots did all the other sorts of work, including mercantile work, and Mercer means merchant.) Even after he’s grudgingly accepted into the group, he finds himself at odds with them, seeing them from a distance. Hill does this outsider’s longing of Ben’s very well, his sense that he never quite knows what the right thing is to do or say. The story of the dig is alternated with Ben’s “Notes Toward a Thesis,” which gives some fascinating history of Sparta, and the attentive reader will pick up a number of clues here. Tobias Hill does a lovely job of showing both the glory and the horror of Sparta, in these notes and at the dig itself.

The end of the novel — which was marketed as a thriller — is very tense, but after I put it down I wondered. The main thing that saves this book from outright implausibility, and from its loose ends (what happened to the story line about Ben’s wife and daughter, for instance?) is the writing. This book can be as dark and eerie as something Poe or Baudelaire would have written, if they had been interested in Sparta. (I think actually Sparta was a little less… luxe than they liked, but let it pass, let it pass.) There are little pockets of description that pop up everywhere, letting us see things vividly, like the meat grill in Metamorphosis:

The flare of incendiary fat. The thutter and blurt of meat. The steel pans gilded with oil. The fish as green as celadon, as dull-bright as lead, as pink as grazed flesh. The rare laughter of the Albanians. A gallon jar of cucumbers, broken in the kitchen yard, the pickles shrivelled in the sun like the cadavers of lizards.

When the characters are a bit over-the-top, or when I thought the novel could have been cut by thirty or forty pages, the writing let me give it a little wiggle room.  The Hidden, as I said, was marketed as a thriller, and certainly there are parts of it that reach for that genre. But more of it, I think, is trying for something like a psychology of obsession, of domination and belonging. I enjoyed it particularly on that level, and look forward to seeing what else Hill writes.

Parable of the Talents

I’m tempted to just tell all of you that this book by Octavia Butler is even better than Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and that you must read it and leave it at that. But I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t believe me, and given that Parable of the Talents is a sequel to Parable of the Sower, you’ll probably need a little more convincing if I’m suggesting that you read two books. Plus, y’all know I’m not likely to just make a suggestion and leave it at that. I like to pick apart my own opinions too much not to dig into why I liked this so much.

In Parable of the Sower, Butler told the story of Lauren Oya Olamina, a young woman who, in the midst of violent civil unrest in the year 2024, escaped her California home and walked north, gathering around her a community of friends and followers. As they walked together, Lauren sowed the seeds of a new religion that she called Earthseed. In Parable of the Talents, we learn what happened to the believers in Earthseed after they settled down and built a small community called Acorn.

The book is made up of writings from Lauren’s journal, as selected by her daughter many years later. Also included are brief excerpts of books by Lauren’s husband and her brother. Lauren’s daughter, who clearly has mixed feelings about her mother’s legacy, offers her own reflections on Lauren’s life and on Earthseed, her first and most beloved child.

Despite the dangers everyone faced in Butler’s version of the early 20th century, Lauren’s small Acorn community thrived in its early years. They’d planted fertile gardens, started a school, acquired a truck, and were making connections with neighbors. Earthseed rituals were being developed and passed along within the community. The world outside was in chaos, and the people of Acorn were always on alert, but they had an idyllic life. That is, until the election of President Donner of the Christian America party. A group calling themselves Donner’s Crusaders decided that the way to get the U.S. back on track was to round up those deemed a danger and reeducate them. Acorn, with its unconventional beliefs, was an obvious target.

I mentioned above that I thought this was a better book than The Handmaid’s Tale, and it’s largely because I found Butler’s vision of an America under the leadership of an extreme right-wing Christian group to be far more convincing than Atwood’s. As much as I love Atwood’s book, I could never see the practices regarding women that are a way of life in her Gilead becoming the norm. Rampant sexism and subjugation of women, yes, but the sexual practices would, I think, be confined to smaller communities–whispered about in closets and basements, glossed over perhaps with an exchange of money to give the appearance of a sort of legitimate surrogacy that skipped the artificial insemination step.

Butler’s future is much closer to what I’d expect. The worst practices—the kidnapping of children, the lack of trials, the torture, the rape—are kept just far enough from public view. The victims are just far enough out of the mainstream that no one will miss them, and if they do break free and share their story, no one will believe them. Here, Lauren reflects on the possible public response to Acorn’s plight:

There are plenty of people who would think the Church was doing something generous and necessary—teaching deadbeats to work and be good Christians. No one would see a problem until the camps were a lot bigger and the people in them weren’t just drifters and squatters. As far as we of Earthseed are concerned, that’s already happened, but who are we? Just weird cultists who practice strange rites, so no doubt there are nice, ordinary people who would be glad to see us taught to behave ourselves too.

How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tormented—reeducated—before it begins to matter to the majority of Americans? Do they know? Would they care? There are worse things happening here in the States and elsewhere, I know. There’s war, for instance.

This book was published in 1998. Before Guantanamo. Before the War on Terror.

Aside from the prescient social commentary, I was intrigued by the way Butler handles religion. Like Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale, she’s careful to show that Christianity as a whole is not necessarily the problem. There are Christian characters who are not part of the government, and some who are remain blind to the problem—in some cases, willfully blind.

Butler’s story, however, shows a deep ambivalence toward religion in general, as evidenced in Lauren’s daughter’s commentary on her mother’s journals. In Butler’s America, religion, especially Earthseed, can be a great force for good. Earthseed is what motivates Lauren to continually strive against her oppressors and to seek people to nurture and love. She wishes to be like the good servant in the biblical parable, who takes the talents he’s been given and uses them to gain more. But her daughter wonders whether her mother’s commitment to the cause kept them apart. If Lauren had converted to the faith of Christian America, she might have had a chance at a relationship with her daughter, but she did not. And if Lauren’s uncle had been less committed to Christian America, he might have built a bridge between mother and daughter, but he did not. The cause became greater than anything, even family love. The third servant in the biblical parable hid his talents in the ground, fearing that he would lose them, only to be condemned in the end. But for Lauren, spreading the talents brought condemnation from a different quarter. Was it worth it?

This is the fourth of Butler’s books that I’ve read and by far my favorite. I’m not sure that it’s her best. Some might find it preachy in a way that her other books aren’t, particularly when it comes to the subjugation of Acorn. I found the exploration of the effects of enslavement and torture on the enslaved and tortured to have value, however. And Butler’s handling of religion is challenging in the best of ways. But what grabbed me by the throat was the book’s relevance to today’s political scene. All my fears about the political climate came to fruition in this book. Yet I was left hopeful. The U.S. political system is easily manipulated, but there are correctives built into it. We the people are the corrective, and if we strive to be the best versions of ourselves, we have the power to change things.

Sunday Links

Welcome to our occasional feature in which we share bookish news and commentary that we’ve come across in recent weeks:

• How is blogging similar to boiling granite? Tom shares his thoughts at Wuthering Expectations (with help from Emerson).
• Kathleen Rooney at the New York Times Magazine talks about the way Jack Handey — yes, Jack Handey, of Deep Thoughts — has freed up genuine poetry, and the way she teaches it to undergraduates.
• Levi at I’ve Been Reading Lately shares some suggestions from Ford Maddox Ford on the uses of books (and bacon).
• Jenn at The Picky Girl mulls over Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man and what it means to be an American.
• Lisa Leff writes an excellent long-form piece for Tablet Magazine about Zosa Szajkowski’s “salvaged” archival Jewish documents, rescued from the Nazis during the Holocaust in France. Here, she discusses possession, rescue, and the delicate nature of archiving.
• Shut the door! According to the Pew Foundation, people visit libraries to borrow books!
• Michael Dirda recommends a new study of early 19th-century American fiction: the novels “are collectively replete with violence, seduction, incest, serial murders, insanity, betrayal and revenge, personality disorders, orgies and much that is simply very, very strange.”
• At the OxfordWords blog, our friend Simon asks whether you can tell the Bible from the Bard.

Readathon Day

Once again, it’s time for Dewey’s Read-a-Thon, a twice-yearly celebration of reading (and snacking). I’ve been planning to participate ever since it was announced, but I’ve been lax about the preparation this time. Never mind, though! I always have a bookcase of books to choose from, and I happen to have a big stack out from the library, so who needs to plan? I did take a little time to make my always essential pumpkin muffins yesterday, and I have fruit and peanut butter and chocolate chip squares and access to a computer to order pizza. So—off we go!

My plan for the day has been to finish Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff, which I just started yesterday, and then see where my mood takes me. However, I may decide to follow my frequently successful tactic of choosing an absorbing chunkster to spend the day with. Last year, I read 11/22/63 by Stephen King, and I can’t imagine a better choice. So it seems appropriate to spend the day today with NOS4A2 by Joe Hill.

I expect to spend most of the day reading, although I have a mid-morning brunch date with some friends. Most of my updates will be on Twitter, but I’ll try to add a few updates to this post as well.

As always, I’m linking my Readathon to a literacy charity and donating 10 cents for every page I read. I was just starting to ponder my charity yesterday when the folks at LibraryThing posted about their collaboration with Books Matter to ship books to schools in Ghana.

So watch this space for further updates throughout the day!

Update 1

Time of Update: 10: 30 a.m.

Now Reading: NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

Total Pages Read : 171 pages total

Total Time Spent Reading: Just over 2 hours

Money Raised for : $17.10

Favorite Quote: “You found yourself a librarian! I can help with the figuring-out thing and point you toward some good poetry while I’m at it. It’s what I do.”

Observations: Finished a fourth of the book already. It reads quickly and is plenty creepy! I’m going to start getting ready to meet some friends for brunch shortly, so I may not get more reading done until the afternoon.

Update 2

Time of Update: 5: 10 p.m.

Now Reading: NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

Total Pages Read : 342 pages total

Total Time Spent Reading: 4 hours, 30 minutes

Money Raised for : $34.20

Favorite Quote: “…even when you seemed completely overpowered, you could still show your teeth.”

Observations: Halfway finished with NOS4A2. It’s a good book, very intense, but not as stomach-churning and oppressive as Heart-Shaped Box. There are more glimmers of hope throughout in this book.

Update 3

Time of Update: 9: 20 p.m.

Now Reading: NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

Total Pages Read : 517 pages total

Total Time Spent Reading: 6 hours, 30 minutes

Money Raised for : $51.70

Favorite Quote: “But… but, like if Keith Richards dreams up a song and then you hear it on the radio, you’ve got his thoughts in your head. My ideas can get in your head just as easily as a bird can fly across the date line.”

Observations: The quote above struck me because I’m seeing lots of references to Stephen King’s work in NOS4A2. There’s a mention of Mid-World, the Good Man, Shawshank prison, Pennywise. There are tons of pop culture references because one of the characters is into comics and other geeky stuff, but the King references aren’t like the others. They’re just slipped in as part of the world Hill is creating, as if his father’s ideas have gotten into his head.

I’ll probably read a little more tonight before going to bed, but I’m not sure that I’ll have another update until the morning. It’s been a nice day, and I’ve gotten a lot of reading done, although between other plans for the day and various distractions, I haven’t participated as fully with Twitter posts and comments as I sometimes do. Every readathon is a little different, and I have to let my mood be my guide.

Final Update

Time of Update: 8: 00 a.m.

Now Reading: NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

Total Pages Read : 648 pages total

Total Time Spent Reading: 8 hours, 15 minutes

Money Raised for : $64.80

Favorite Quote: [Lou, in the hospital, notices that his nurse has a tattoo of Serenity on his arm.] “I am a leaf on the wind,” Lou said, and the man-nurse said, “Dude, don’t say that. I don’t want to start crying on the job.”

Observations: I just about finished NOS4A2this morning. Once again, the strategy of choosing a single, highly immersive book to read worked well. I see people remarking on feeling bad that they only finished one book during the Readathon, but I really do feel that one gripping book that holds my interest is the way to go for me, and I don’t entirely understand why a stack of different books is the “readathon-appropriate” way. I’ve read multiple books on Readathon day a couple of times, and it was fine, but no better than sticking with one book. The nice thing about one book is that I don’t have to switch gears so often, and I genuinely don’t want to stop reading. Plus, I’m not left with a whole backlog of books to review.

The End of the Affair

There’s a story I love about Graham Greene. In 1949, the New Statesman held a contest for parodies of Greene’s writing style. Greene himself entered the contest under a pseudonym, and won second (!) prize. Sixteen years later, in 1965, Greene entered a similar New Statesman contest, and this time he only got an honorable mention. Don’t you think this says that his real writing style had evolved during that time, and that those holding the contest hadn’t noticed? In any case, it speaks to a certain cocked-eyebrow, self-deprecating irony, and this makes itself felt in his books.

The End of the Affair doesn’t seem to have much of that reserved irony at first. Maurice Bendrix, the narrator, begins his tale two years after his married lover Sarah has thrown him over with no explanation, and he’s still in a snarling place of pain and hatred. He runs across Sarah’s husband Henry, and discovers that Henry — innocent Henry, who never suspected Maurice and Sarah’s adulterous affair — now thinks Sarah may have taken a lover. Maurice instantly launches an investigation to find out who Henry’s (and, as he sees it, his own) rival may be.

He expects to hate his rival. What he doesn’t expect is to be utterly perplexed. When Maurice eventually reads Sarah’s journals, he discovers that all along, his rival has been God, in whom he doesn’t believe — and neither does Sarah. After a bombing that left Maurice pinned under a door and apparently dead, her love of Maurice led her to make a bargain with this nonexistent God — let him live and I’ll never see him again — and when Maurice turns up with scarcely a scratch, she knows she must keep her vow.

She keeps it, but she keeps it in agony. She rationalizes in her journal, backward and forward:

A vow’s not all that important — a vow to somebody I’ve never known, to somebody I don’t really believe in. Nobody will know that I’ve broken a vow, except me and Him — and He doesn’t exist, does He? He can’t exist. You can’t have a merciful God and this despair.

She rants at God: “I don’t believe in You yet, I don’t believe in You yet,” and she hates him — “While I loved Maurice, I loved Henry, and now I’m what they call good, I don’t love anyone at all. And You least of all,” just as Maurice begins his account by saying that his is a story of hate. The words don’t ring false; this isn’t a case of protesting too much. Both Maurice and Sarah are saying precisely what they feel. But can you hate someone who doesn’t exist? Can Maurice be furiously jealous of a delusion? Hate, like its sister love, must have an object. And that object infuses the pages of this book, patient and silent.

One tremendously interesting thing about this book — and this is Greene, through and through — is how physical it is. Maurice and Sarah are in love, but they are driven by desire, an unmistakably physical, sexual relationship. Even at the moment they are separated forever, it’s just after sex:

No, the V1s didn’t affect us until the act of love was over. I had spent everything I had, and was lying back with my head on her stomach and her taste — as thin and elusive as water — in my mouth, when one of the robots crashed down on to the Common and we could hear the glass breaking further down the south side.

This physicality, this embodiment, is about God, as well. This is an incarnational book, and it’s thoroughgoing about it:

So today I looked at that material body on that material cross, and I wondered, how could the world have nailed a vapour there? A vapour of course felt no pain and no pleasure. It was only my superstition that imagined it could answer my prayers. Dear God, I had said. I should have said, Dear Vapour. I had said I hate you, but can one hate a vapour? I could hate that figure on the cross with its claim to my gratitude — ‘I’ve suffered this for you’, but a vapour… And yet Richard believed in even less than a vapour. He hated a fable, he fought against a fable, he took a fable seriously. I couldn’t hate Hansel and Gretel, I couldn’t hate their sugar house as he hated the legend of heaven… The Devil didn’t exist and God didn’t exist, but all his hatred was for the good fairy-tale, not the wicked one. Why? I looked up at that over-familiar body, stretched in imaginary pain, the head drooping like a man asleep. I thought, sometimes I’ve hated Maurice, but would I have hated him if I hadn’t loved him too? Oh God, if I could really hate you, what would that mean?

Not only can Sarah not love if there’s no one there to love, she can’t love (or hate — tomato, tomahto) if there’s no body there to love. Greene is that specific.

But hate and love and jealousy are not the only tangles in this book. Greene leaves us wondering about faith and doubt as well. Was Sarah really converted? Her journal entries imply that she was won over to faith, but the last one leaves us in uncharted seas, still longing for “ordinary corrupt human love” and asking for peace. And Maurice echoes Sarah at the end of the book, speaking to the God he doesn’t believe in:

O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and too old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.

I’ve read some complaints about the neat-and-tidy miracles in the book. I’m not so sure that they are as neat and tidy as they appear. Each one appears more obvious than the last, but isn’t that because we are seeing things through Maurice and Sarah’s eyes? Both faith and doubt make us interpret events in certain ways.

And this brings me to the narrative structure, something Teresa brought up in her outstanding review from last year. Maurice is a successful writer. Never forget that he’s arranging events as he sees fit. Even when he shares Sarah’s journal, he doesn’t share it in order: he reveals the last two entries first, and then goes back to the beginning. The very first line of the novel tells us,

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

If we see miracles in this book — if we move from doubt to faith to doubt again and then call an end to the story — it is Maurice’s choice. Never forget the storyteller, and his craft, and the way his pain is a filter for the story — or rather, is the story itself. What is seen is what is real, like the way Maurice’s private detective misinterprets what he sees and makes a new reality from it. Here is the irony I was talking about at the beginning. What is true? What is false? We are never quite certain; there is a wryness here that I love.

This was a wonderful book: ambiguous, angry, often heartbreaking. It left me thinking long after the last page. Teresa had me read it for our yearly book swap, and now I recommend it to you.

Someone at a Distance

Widowed, in the house her husband had built with day and night nurseries and a music-room, as if the children would stay there for ever, instead of marrying and going off at the earliest possible moment, old Mrs. North yielded one day to a long-felt desire to provide herself with company. She answered an advertisement in the personal column of The Times.

Old Mrs. North’s husband had spoilt her, but now that he was dead and her three children married, no one spoilt her any more. She didn’t come first with anybody and she didn’t like that.

In her pursuit of company to spoil her in the way that she wishes, Mrs. North welcomes a young French woman, Louise Lanier, into her home. Her housekeeper, Miss Daley, takes a strong dislike to the interloper, who won’t lift a finger to help around the house. And Mrs. North’s son and daughter-in-law, Avery and Ellen, find Louise unfriendly and difficult to talk to, although they seem happy enough that Mrs. North has a companion she likes, easing their guilt at not visiting as often as they perhaps should.

Dorothy Whipple’s 1953 novel is a study of how, given just the right (or wrong) circumstances, individual personalities can interact in such a way that disaster seems almost inevitable. In Someone at a Distance, she brings together a selfish young woman, smarting from her own heartbreak; an equally selfish older women, reveling in her attention; a weak-willed and selfish man; an obliging wife; and two children with a strong sense of right and wrong. In the background are a French family who’ve tried their best, a slew of concerned English neighbors, and a young French couple who have no idea that their own happy connection is, in a small and coincidental way, the catalyst that leads to the dissolution of a family.

Whipple renders her characters with great attention to detail, often noting habits and actions that only seem significant in retrospect. Louise’s love of Madame Bovary seems natural at first glance, but appears sinister in light of later events, particularly when contrasted with Ellen’s affection for the likes of Evelyn Underhill. Even minor characters, such as Louise’s parents, are rendered carefully, right down to Mr. Lanier’s Zola-esque appearance. These are full-bodied people, with flaws and foibles that bump up against each other in satisfying ways for a reader.

Many people have showered this book with love, but I have to admit I was a little disappointed at the turn this book took about halfway through. The first part of the book is a quiet, sometimes funny take on clashes of culture and personality. Later, however, it turns into a domestic drama, and all of the characters suffer a bit in the transition. Their primary qualities become fixed in stone, and we see little of the complexity of the first half. Ellen comes out well from it, as the crisis forces her to draw upon her industriousness and resolve. However, she is perhaps too resolved, letting herself be guided solely by her children and not taking a moment to stop and think. There’s a hardness about her, and especially about her children, that I found distasteful. Avery is a total mess, and I had no sympathy for his self-pitying justifications that made him seem comically weak. Yet I couldn’t get past the way these characters refused to have a proper conversation and find a way forward until it is too late to do so. Part of my annoyance is, I’m sure, down to the fact that I’m living in 2013, when attitudes about marriage are so different, but the alacrity with which these characters make irrevocable choices felt false.

Louise’s characterization in the last half of the book troubled me the most; she goes from being a confused and selfish girl to being a gold-digging vixen. Looking back, I could see that the idea of the vixen had been planted early on (with Madame Bovary, among other things), but I preferred the more complex rendering of a girl making misguided and even mean-spirited choices out of pain and fear. Despite the hints Whipple drops, Louise doesn’t feel like a vixen in those first chapters, and there’s no sense of her gradually growing into the role.

I was so absorbed in this book that I ended up reading it in just a couple of sittings, but my praise is tempered a little by my wish for a little more subtlety of characterization. As good as it is, the last half doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the first.

In the Woods

Blogging has been a wonderful memory tool for me. Before I started keeping records of what I read and what I think about it, I used to wander about in the library, thinking, “Have I read that one, or…?” and I’d bring it home, and halfway through I’d realize that yes, indeed, I had read it. This book was the reverse error. I was fairly sure I’d started Tana French’s In the Woods several years back (pre-blogging), and that I hadn’t liked it and hadn’t finished it. But we were reading it for my mystery book club, so I thought I might as well give it another shot. I’m so glad I did! Not only am I innocent of ever having read this book before, it was a well-written, enjoyable debut mystery from an author I’d certainly like to try again.

When Rob Ryan was 12 years old, three children from his Irish village were lost in the woods. Two were never found. The third — Rob himself — was found gripping a tree in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to remember a single detail of the preceding hours. Fast-forward twenty years, and Rob is a homicide detective, partnered with Cassie Maddox, and still unable to dredge up memories of much of his childhood. But when another girl is found dead in his home village of Knocknaree, he may have a chance to solve this murder as well as his own past.

The best part of this book was the evocative way it was written. Rob, the narrator, weaves stories from the squad room, stories from his childhood, suspect interviews, and scenes from his close partnership and friendship with Cassie together seamlessly and with a light touch. The partnership is particularly well done: French really brings out the joy and tenderness of a really close friendship between young people, the sparking of ideas, the in-jokes, the banter, the trust. The police-procedural part of the book is interesting and realistic, but it’s wedged in around the relationships, which are really the spine of the novel.

I will say that I found the thing that was supposed to be a Big Surprise predictable from the beginning, and I think most experienced mystery readers will also find it so, but in the end, the big reveal is not the most important thing about the book. The slow crumble of the case is difficult to watch, because the buildup of it was so beautifully done, and the ending satisfies more for psychological reasons than for any surprise factor. French is better at understanding people and their motivations than she is at doing jigsaw puzzles, and that’s a compliment.

Several people in my book group complained about the ending, because (as I mentioned in my brief summary) there are two mysteries in this novel, and one of them is resolved, and the other is not. They felt they were left hanging. I disagreed: I never expected one of the mysteries to be resolved, and would have been faintly annoyed to have it tied up in a neat bow. I prefer ambiguous endings, and this one came well up to scratch.

There were a few things that bothered me in this novel — there’s one plot point that I thought was awkwardly handled and unrealistic — but I think they are the quirks of a debut novel. Overall, I thought it was gripping, well-written, witty, and completely enjoyable. I look forward to reading the next in the series.