"Mrs Hemingway" by Naomi Wood

If you want to get any sense of how Ernest Hemingway became a Nobel laureate and progenitor of a stylistic school in literature, don't read this book. Read one of his novels instead. This book focuses on the women he married to the extent that he might as well have been a car salesman as a writer. 

The author Ernest Hemingway overlapped his wives: the next wife was his mistress towards the end of the tenure of the current wife. Thus first wife Hadley was replaced by her best friend Fife. Ernest was still married to Fife while carrying on an affair with journalist and author Martha Gellhorn who became Mrs H#3. Mary, the fourth wife, started sleeping with Ernest while he was married to Martha. Mary was, perhaps, lucky that Ernest shot himself (accident or suicide) before moving on from her.

This novel focuses on the overlaps. Which was a bit repetitive.

The narrative was from the perspective of the current wife, in the third person. The current time was written in the present tense; the flashbacks were narrated in the past tense.

The problem was that I wasn't particularly interested in the women. Apart from Martha, the other wives didn't really do anything exciting enough to warrant a biography (except marry Ernest). Perhaps this is why they only got a quarter of a biography each. But this compounded the problem. We never really grappled with any of them in depth.

Basically I was bored. I perked up a bit when we reached Martha. Martha Gellhorn was a journalist who became a great war correspondent, reminding me of photojournalist Lee Miller whom I learned about in the book The Age of Light and the film Lee. This book mentions her journalism and the novels she has written but, again, it doesn't really get into her as a writer. Focussing on her as a wife does her a disservice. It is said that she didn't want to become "a footnote in someone else's life" but this is exactly what she has become in this book. 

On the plus side, I realised that I haven't read any Hemingway for a long, long time and I ought to go back to him. 

Selected quotes:

• “The trees’ shadows pour onto the water like vinegar into oil.” (Ch 5)
• “The hangover: such a cure, she thinks, for overthinking.” (Ch 22) I'm not sure whether I like or dislike the double use of think in this sentence.
• “I put the needle on the same place in the same track and I expect a different tune.” (Ch 34)
• “His eyes are like the twin holes of a rifle.” (Ch 37) But does a rifle have two holes?

This was a book about the domestic circumstances of one of the major forces of twentieth century. It's a bit like writing a novel about the catering arrangements during the Olympic Games; I'd rather find out about the gold medallists.

September 2024; 317 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Down the Rabbit Hole" by Juan Pablo Villabolos

 A little boy grows up in his gangster father's fortress, surrounded only by henchmen. Beautiful and heartbreaking.

This tiny novel is narrated by Tochtli (his name means 'rabbit' in Nahuatl, Mexico's major indigenous language), a precocious, seven-year-old boy. He lives, with thirteen or fourteen other people, in a fortress he thinks is a palace with his gangster father whom he thinks is a king; the 'palace' has a room full of money and jewels and even four crowns. We see his claustrophobic world through his eyes. Of course his perceptions are distorted by what he has been told and his limited experience. Sometimes this is darkly funny: he rather likes the French because they have a habit of cutting off heads. Sometimes it is worrying: his dad has to shave Tochtli's head because "hair is like a corpse you wear on your head while you're alive ... that grows and grows without stopping, which is very sordid." (Ch 1) Sometimes it is downright sinister: he plays a question-and-answer game with his dad where "one person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell." (Ch 1) What he knows is disturbing: “There are actually lots of ways of making corpses, the most common ones are with orifices. Orifices are holes you make in people so their blood comes out. Bullets from pistols make orifices and knives can make orifices too.” (Ch 1) Unsuprisingly, his belly hurts all the time which a doctor diagnoses as a psychosomatic illness but "my mind isn't ill, my brain has never hurt." (Ch 1)

'Macho' is good, 'faggots' are bad. He doesn't like things that are 'sordid' or 'pathetic'. 

Tochtli's discovery of room full of armaments disturbs him because his dad told him the room was empty and being in a gang means that he and his dad shouldn't lie to one another. Tochtli resolves the situation by becoming mute (there are several examples in his little world of people who don't speak aloud, at least in front of Tochtli). So his father, who presumably needs to get out of Mexico for a while, takes Tochtli and his teacher, under false names, to Liberia to collect for Tochtli what the little boy wants: the (endangered) Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. And the adventure becomes funnier, more sinister, and sadder.

This is an astonishing book. In its child narrator with a restricted perspective it reminded me of the first part of Emma Donoghue's Room. In the way much of the humour (and the sadness) derives from the reader understanding so much more than the narrator, it reminded me of the Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend. 

Adam Thirlwell, in the Introduction to the & Other Stories edition of the Rosalind Harvey translation of this novel, describes this book as a fugue: "through his permutations of a limited set of perceptions and vocabularies, a devastated world emerges." It is a beautiful piece of writing.

Selected quotes:

• “What I definitely am is macho. For example: I don't cry all the time because I don't have a mum ... because people who cry are faggots.” (Ch 1)
• “The realist's favourite saying is you have to be realistic.” (Ch 1)
• “The best thing about being a king is that you don't have to work.” (Ch 1)
• “To be a king in Africa you have to kill lots of people. It's like a competition: the one who wears the crown is the one who's made the most corpses.” (Ch 1)
• “Today there was an enigmatic corpse on the TV: they cut off his head and he wasn't even the King. it didn't look like it was the work of the French either, who like cutting off heads so much.” (Ch 1)

September 2024; 70 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Roswell Incident" by Charles Berlitz and William Moore

 Did a flying saucer containing extraterrestrials crash-land near Roswell, New Mexico, USA in 1947?

This is the book that popularised the idea that it did. The primary author, Charles Berlitz, grandson of the man who founded the language school, had already written several books on paranormal phenomena including the highly successful The Bermuda Triangle.

The problem is that the evidence is utterly unconvincing. There is no physical evidence (a lack explained away using conspiracy theories). It is entirely based on witness testimony. Worse, the vast majority of this testimony is secondhand. The rancher (called Brazel, bizarrely the nephew of the man who shot Pat Garret, the man who shot Billy the Kid) who allegedly picked up the debris of a 'flying saucer' (or man-made balloon) is dead so we have to rely on what his children, and friends, say that he told them.  Sometimes the chain of witnesses becomes protracted, such as when the rancher's son repeats a story he was told by "a fellow who worked with me on a job in Alaska for a while" or when the rancher's neighbour's wife had a brother who was allegedly on the plane that flew the wreckage to a military depot.

If this was a court case with no forensic evidence and predominantly hearsay evidence it would be thrown out of court. So Berlitz and Moore do what any decent lawyer would do in these circumstances: they use rhetoric to blow smoke into the reader's eyes. For example, they give third-person evidence in the first person. They proclaim that their witnesses are reputable tellers of the truth. And they bring on 'expert' witnesses such as Meade Layne and Reilley Crabbe of the Borderland Sciences Research Foundation which sounds impressive until you discover (not from this book) that this Foundation researches 'scientific' topics such as human auras, telepathy, spirit communications and seances.

There is one first hand witness: Major Jesse A Marcel who was “ranking staff officer in charge of intelligence at the Roswell Army Air Base at the time of the incident.” (Ch 4) The authors make a great deal of (impressive) military credentials including his medals, being shot down, though I'm not sure that any of that attests to his honesty or his reliability as a witness; indeed, being in charge of intelligence might suggest a willingness to manipulate the truth. The authors don't speculate on why Major Marcel waited 31 years before claiming that the wreckage he saw was from a UFO. But he certainly saw the debris that was collected from the ranch and he now (after 31 years) testifies it was "definitely not a weather or tracking device, nor was it any sort of plane or missile.” A number of other witnesses claim the debris was not from a weather balloon but since the authors aren't prepared to say what weather balloon wreckage was like, the reader cannot make up their own mind.

I believe that something crashed. It was probably a high altitude surveillance balloon. Project Mogul was a top secret experimental attempt to use balloons to listen for shock waves coming from Russian nuclear tests; these were the early days of the Cold War. A balloon had been launched on June 4th 1947 and contact with it was lost close to Brazel's ranch. Crucially, the balloons used for Mogul were not weather balloons, using different materials such as polyethylene (which had only begun large scale manufacture in the US in 1944 and was therefore probably unknown to the witnesses). So the 'it was not a weather balloon' can be true and still not require the considerable leap of faith to believe that the wreckage was of extraterrestrial origin. 

What about the little grey men who were supposed to have been captured, dead or alive, and whose corpses are still believed by enthusiasts to be kept in an air force base somewhere? This book discusses them too but never points out that they aren't actually linked to Roswell. Their story also originated in Mexico but in Aztec in 1949. Two men called Newton and Gebauer were selling devices that claimed to use extraterrestrial technology to locate deposits of oil, gas and gold. The technology, they claimed, came from a flying saucer from Venus that had landed near Aztec in March 1948. 

Berlitz and Moore don't mention Newton and Gebauer. Of course not. They spend a lot of time and trouble asserting the credibility of their sources so the fact that this pair were subsequently convicted of fraud might undermine their case. Instead, Berlitz and Moore move on to asserting that there must have been a military cover-up because the military won't admit to having alien corpses in cold storage. 

It's not just the silliness of the claims they make that annoys me, it is the inadequate partiality of the way they treat the evidence. If something doesn't help their case they will scrutinise it, asking questions such as: why did he do this? or why did she not do that? But anything that supports their beliefs will be swallowed without scrutiny.

It is interesting to read this book as a textbook exercise in fallacy, rhetoric and gullibility. Otherwise, it is rather silly.

September 2024; 163 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Order of the Day" by Eric Vuillard

 

Where the Nuremberg rallies were held

Winner of the 2017 Prix Goncourt, this short book analyses the inadequate and perhaps criminal attempts to stop the rise of the Nazis.

It consists of a series of brief tableaux in which men meet. First up is a bunch of German industrialists being persuaded to donate money to the Nazi party to fund the forthcoming elections. There is an account of the meeting between Hitler and the Chancellor of Austria in which the latter was browbeaten into accepting impossible demands. There is a cringeworthy luncheon party in which Chamberlain hosts Ribbentrop at the moment that Austria is being invaded. 

In summing up, the book says: “We never fall twice into the same abyss. But we always fall the same way, in the mixture of ridicule and dread.” (Who are all these people?) In each of the short chapters there is a (hindsight-driven) sense of inevitability worthy of a Greek tragedy. Yet, at the same time, the ordinary and the bathetic everyday turn the  drama into comedy, such as when mechanical breakdown and fuel shortages turn the Nazi invasion of Austria into a traffic jam of tanks. 

But is it fiction? The blurb describes this book as a novel. Yet it seems grounded in fact and meticulous research and the author provides a forensic analysis. Does this make it history, rather than historical fiction? I suppose it is the sort of 'true story' in which some episodes have been dramatised, like a TV drama-documentary, a work of faction. Something similar to Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally.

The author's detailed scrutiny apportions unforgiving blame. After the industrialists make their contributions the author comments: "Corruption is an irreducible line item in the budget of large companies, and it goes by several names: lobbying fees, gifts, political corruptions." But in the sentence before he has talked about "kickbacks and backhanders". These, he implies, are bribes. And in the final chapter he lists which of the companies owned by those 'captains of industry' profited from forced labour from inmates of concentration camps. As for Chamberlain's luncheon? “Before the war, Chamberlain, who owned several properties, apparently counted Ribbentrop among his tenants.” (Farewell Luncheon in Downing Street) Surely a conflict of interest! In the end, the author decides that Ribbentrop deliberately prolonged the luncheon to delay the British government's response, aware that the olde-worlde courtesy of the British would trump the urgency of business.

It is beautifully written. It reads as if the author has taken care in selecting every single word. 

Selected quotes:

• “Most people spent the morning grinding away, immersed in the great, decent fallacy of work, with its small gestures that enfold a silent, conventional truth and reduce the entire epic of our lives to a diligent pantomime.” (A Secret Meeting)
• “Palladio rather nebulously defines a salon as a living room, the stage on which we play out the vaudeville of our existence.” (Masks)
• “The English aristocrat, the diplomat standing proudly behind his little line of forebears, deaf as trombones, dumb as buzzards, and blind as donkeys, leaves me cold.” (A Courtesy Call)
• “It rained outside and drops struck the pains like a piano sonata played by an inexpert hand.” (A Day on the Phone)

An exquisite miniature. September 2024; 129 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Rabbit Redux" by John Updike

Ranked 88 in the Guardian's 100 best novels.  

In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, Updike's 'Everyman', Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is ten years older and still trying to cope, like the USA, with the difference between life and reality. 

As the novel starts, Apollo 11 is launched in its historic mission to land the first man on the moon. But back on Earth the Vietnam War is still in full swing, there are antiwar protests and race riots, and the values that conservative America took for granted are under attack. Harry's home town of Brewer is in economic decline, dying from the inside, leaving the suburbs. His mum is dying of Parkinson's, his wife is having an affair, and his son is about to become. 

It's a challenging novel, with racism and misogyny, including multiple uses of the n-word and the c-word. Some of the worst racist prejudices are articulated. There are scenes of physical domestic abuse. At the outset, Harry is rabidly conservative, staunchly defending American values on Vietnam and fearful of blacks. His wife says he is "silent majority ... but he keeps making noise." whereas Charlie Stavros calls him "a typical good-hearted imperialist racist." (Ch 1) But deep down he has no solid core and one wonders whether he believes in anything; this makes it easy for others to push him around and take advantage of his fundamental good nature.

Harry, from the lower middle-class, represents an America that has lost its way. It can land a man on the moon but it is fighting an unjustifiable war abroad and it is fighting itself at home. Horrid things are said, horrid things happen, but this is a realist's portrait of an ugly world, 'warts and all'. Harry Angstrom is no hero and there are things that he thinks and says and does that are awful, but he is capable of learning, of improvement, of redemption.

The characters are about as real as any I have met on the page. There are some extraordinarily vivid descriptions. This masterpiece must be a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.

Selected quotes:

• “A world where inches matter. Putts. Fucks. Orbits.” (Ch 1)
• “The minds gone dry as haystacks rats slither through.” (Ch 1)
• “Rabbit turns from the window and everywhere in his own house sees a slippery disposable gloss. It glints back at him from the synthetic fabric of the living room sofa and a chair, the synthetic artiness of a lamp Janet brought that has a piece of driftwood weighted and wired as its base, the unnatural-looking natural wood of the shelves empty but for a few ashtrays with the sheen of fairground souvenirs; it glints back at him from the steel sink, the kitchen with its whorls as of madness, oil in water, things don't mix. The window above the sink is black and opaque as the orange that paints the asylum windows.” (Ch 1)
• “Fat-fried food and a diet of dough that would give a pig pimples.” (Ch 1) Noy only is it funny, it has a three alliterations in fourteen words!
• “All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.” (Ch 1)
• “From this low chair the view is flung out of sight and becomes all sky. A thin bright wash, stripes like fat in bacon.” (Ch 2)
• “In a room obliquely off the main room, a pool table: colored boys all arms and legs spidering around the idyllic green felt.” (Ch 2) Spidering!
• “Her eyes are green. The dry tired green, yet one of his favorite colors, of August grass.” (Ch 2)
• “Usually I try to rise above eating ... it's one of the uglier things we do.” (Ch 2)
• “Billy is gruesome, with his father's skinny neck and big ears and his mother's mooncalf eyes and the livid festerings of adolescence speckling his cheeks and chin.” (Ch 3)
• “Put enough rats in a cage the fat ones get more frantic than the skinny ones ‘cause they feel more squeezed.” (Ch 3)
• “Coloured fragments pour down toward him through the hole in the ceiling. Green machines, an ugly green, eating ugly green bushes. red mud pressed in patterns to an ooze by Amtrac treads. The emerald of rice paddies, each plant set there with its reflection in the water pure as a monogram.” (Ch 3)
• “When one of them unfriendly mortar shells hits near your hole it is as if a wall were there that was big and solid, twenty feet thick of noise, and you is just a gushy bug.” (Ch 3)
• “Gangsters are puritans. They're narrow and hard because of the straight path you don't live.” (Ch 4)
• “Pay for what you get because anything free has a rattlesnake under it.” (Ch 4)

September 2024; 233 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Every trick in the book" by Iain Hood

 In a world where no-one can be trusted, how can we know the truth?

Paul is an undercover cop who, twenty years ago, married Julia in order to infiltrate and spy on left-wing activists; now he is in danger of being exposed. What effect will this have on his wife and their two children?

But this is not just the story of one exposed undercover cop. It doubles down. Just suppose that someone is spying on the spy. Hood's CCTV-stuffed London is a Kafkaesque world in which the questions are: who can we trust, what can we believe, and how can any system cope with all that information? Conspiracy theories, even though they may be justified, breed paranoia and paranoid delusions are, as Paul discovers, symptomatic of certifiable mental illness. Misinformation and disinformation may or may not result in real-life tragedies, such as a child catching measles because the parent refused the MMR vaccine. As with quantum physics, when solidity is an illusion, where can we find firm ground on which to base our beliefs?

Hood doesn't use just narrative to make his point. Sentence segments are blanked out, as if the record has been censored. Blank pages parenthesise a section whose pages become increasingly grey as the streams of consciousness of the family members become increasingly turbulent and intermixed. At one stage Paul finds himself thinking "incomplete things. He is also looking out of the." The descriptions of the first few pages are revisited in a much more sinister way. A confusing section of dialogue is 'replayed' with character tags. Even the chapter numbers are playful, counting up in the first section, down in the second, and up again in the third. It's cryptic and it's clever and it's fun.

There are some very humorous bits as well. I loved the fact that all the policemen in London seemed to be Scottish ... after all, they work in Scotland Yard. A psychiatric report on Paul consistently misspells 'etc' as "ect" (hinting at ECT: electroconvulsive therapy?) And I enjoyed the references to 'uncle' Douglas MacDougal (eg 2.17), a character who appears in Hood's first book This Good Book (and later it is suggested that Paul writes a book entitled "This Good Cop"; 2.9)

As Paul tries to explain: “Everybody knows the price of freedom is eternal surveillance.” (3.13) This, of course, is a deliberate misquote. Thomas Jefferson said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. But that's the point of this clever and convoluted book.

Selected quotes:

• “If finding out where the neo-Nazis in society are camped, then Neighbourhood Watch is the right way to go about it. Other than that, fucking rubbish. Fucking Stasi.” (1.14)
• “If all the cameras on walls are achieving anything at all, and it isn't achieving any more security for us, it's just saying we're behind our big walls and big gates and concrete blocks and we're scared shitless about all you scrotes outside them.” (1.14)
• “Behind big bad scary Wizard of Oz is people doing spreadsheets.” (1.14)
• “There's a weird thing to being mental, Paul is thinking, you look as though you have superhuman strength.” (2.12)
• “He's the fine figure of a man when he can be arsed.” (2.9)
• “Maybe the horrible truth is we live in a culture where young women and some young men have become so confused by relationships they see the only way forward from a bad relationship is taking the other person to court charged with it.” (3.13)

September 2024; 191 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"No Accident" by Robert Crouch

A well-written whodunnit murder mystery which manages to be original while conforming to the genre.

Kent Fisher is everything you would expect the protagonist of a murder mystery to be. He has an antagonistic past relationship with the chief suspect, he has a colourful history and traumatic personal life, he fails to play by the rules (which gets him suspended, of course!), he has a glamorous (though not stupid) side-kick, he cracks not-very-good jokes, he picks up on inconsequential details and his obsession with the case leads to a situation where he could lose everything. But, uniquely in my experience, he is an Environmental Health Officer who normally checks the hygiene standards of restaurants (and this corner of East Sussex appears to specialise in filthy kitchens) but on this occasion is called to investigate what appears to be a fatal work accident. 

Which means, of course, no forensic team taking the guesswork out of the investigation and ruining the fun.

It's an energetic and convoluted classic of the genre. It started sedately, with some original settings, convincingly described, and the careful development of some fascinating characters. Around the half-way mark, the pace picks up and the revelations and twists start to pour in. In the final quarter, the hunt for the killer becomes a thrilling chase with heavily built henchmen, secret passages and guns. 

I wasn't entirely convinced by the final solution to the crime and there were perhaps too many characters (next time I'll write a list). But who could fail to be entertained by a story that has everyone and everything including a cabinet minister, a sleazy casino owner, a Wild West theme park, a family that dates to before the Conquest, a stately home turned into a hotel, an animal rescue centre and a Westie named Columbo? It even included advice on how to clean a microwave oven: “Half fill a jug of water and add a few drops of lemon juice. Two to three minutes on full power and the steam will lift the grease." (Ch 54)

This was a well-written page-turner that took me for a fun romp across the South Downs. 

Selected quotes:

• “Still trying to be the comedian instead of the joke" (Ch 3)
• "He’s not a bad cook for a Scenes of Crime Officer. When he retired three years ago his cooking was as dire as his DIY skills. For someone who could piece together a crime scene from fragments and minute traces, he couldn’t assemble a cupboard from a flat pack." (Ch 14)
• "She never wore makeup, rarely smiled, and preferred to live in the past, which I suppose you would if you taught history." (Ch 16)
• "It’s difficult to imagine this clandestine world coexisting with the peaceful one I inhabit. In my world, the biggest crime, ... is to build social housing in villages." (Ch 46)
• “Miss McNamara will see you in her suite, Mr Fisher. She wishes to know if your visit is social or antisocial.” (Ch 51)
• "Mike once did an astronomy course there and was upset when they didn’t award stars for good work." (Ch 55)

September 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Colour" by Rose Tremain

Shortlisted for the 2004 Women's Prize for Fiction.

The Colour is set during a nineteenth-century gold-rush in New Zealand. It chronicles the lives of Joseph Blackstone and his wife Harriet, newly arrived from Norfolk in England with Joseph's mother, Lilian, hoping to build a farm on South Island. Lilian longs to be back in the relative civilisation of Christchurch. Harriet, who has been rescued from boredom as a governess, dreams of adventure and of having a child. Joseph has a guilty secret.

Meanwhile Edwin and his Maori nurse share a spiritual connection which threatens him and forces her on a quest. I found this sub-plot a distraction to the main action.

Their inexperience and New Zealand's vicious climate combine to make their first year a disaster. Then Joseph discovers a few grains of gold ("colour") in his creek. And then he hears of miners heading for a remote region and gold fever enters his heart.

This is a book about human weakness and the accompanying guilt, and about hardships and their survival. Sometimes it is about the compromises and the sacrifices that one must make in order to survive, so that one's soul survives. Each of the characters attempts to put on an armoured exterior but deep in their soft and secret core they have a name and a dream and a hope and kindness. The only thing about the book which is always cruel and unforgiving is the countryside, a place of suffocating snow and bone-biting cold, of wind and torrential rain and flooding, weather that can kill and can even destroy a house. A place that offers gold but demands a sacrifice, a price that is perhaps too high to pay.

Characters:

The principal characters in this book are complex and carefully drawn so that the glimpses we catch of them can be assembled into real human beings.

The main protagonist Harriet is Joseph's wife, a position she undertook to liberate herself from "Twelve years of being a governess, yoked to a room, frozen behind a wooden desk as time kept passing and never stopping for her." (III: The Power of Dreams, 1) She longs for adventure and a child. Shes the practical one, shown early when she helps them escape from a snow-covered house. There is an element of the Hero's Journey about Harriet's plot once she has left the farm and set off in search of Joseph: at one point she faces an ordeal and fails, later there is a near death experience

Joseph is somehow an archetypal male: he dreams of wealth but he is hopeless when it comes to the details and all he really knows how to do is fail. Unfortunately, those he loves often suffer from his failures.

Lilian is Joseph's mother. We first encounter her mourning her crockery which has been broken on the journey from Norfolk; she spends her evenings puzzling and gluing them back together. This is a metaphor if nothing is. She spends her time in regrets over her husband, foolishly dead, and her once-respectable life. 

Will is an utterly cynical rent boy who lives parasitically on the miners.

Chen is a Chinaman who grows vegetables and sells them to the miners. His has the Buddhist quality of detaching himself from the situation and maintaining inner peace, although his internal life with its hopes and desires is as complex as anyone's.

One is motivated to read, partly to discover Joseph's secret and partly to find out whether anyone finds any gold and, if they do, whether they can keep hold of it and, if so, whether it is going to make them happy.

Selected quotes:

• “In the violet clouds of afternoon lay the promise of a great winding sheet of snow.” (I: The Cob House. 1864. 1)
• “Women understood each other, or so he assumed, for someone must understand them and he knew that he did not.” (I: Beauty’s Coat, 1)
• “‘I often wonder,’ said Lilian, as she cleared away the cutlery, ‘ why god gave the animals such ugly voices’.” (I: Beauty’s Coat, 4)
• “His clothes were noisy as he moved inside them.” (I: The Orchard Run, 2)
• “She spent her evening mending broken plates” (I: Bargains, 4)
• "Lit by the small flame, the expressions on the faces of the men seemed neither cheerful or sad, but to have about them a strong degree of resignation, as though the world had pestered them - like a mosquito or like a fly - pestered them for so long that they could no longer be bothered to swat it away, but just let it settle quietly on them." (I: D'Erlanger's Hotel, 6)
• "She thought that she was doing the best she could for it and she told herself that seldom is any 'best' so good that it could not be further perfected." (II: The Road to the Taramakan, 1)

September 2024; 366 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Overstory" by Richard Powers

This ecolit novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018. It is about trees and the people who love them.

It starts with 'Roots': potted biographies, including, where appropriate, family histories, of the characters who will come together in the main part of the book (called Trunk). Nicholas, an artist, grows up on a farm in Iowa in the shadow of one of America's last chestnuts. Mimi Ma's father is an engineer who escaped China just before the communist takeover. Adam is a strange lad who is fascinated by behaviour. Ray and Dorothy are a courting couple who come together during an amateur performance of Macbeth. Douglas is a Vietnam vet drifting through life. Neelay is a young lad with the dream of becoming a computer programmer. Patricia is a scientist whose paper on how trees communicate is met with widespread scorn. Olivia, my favourite character, is a dissolute student who electrocutes herself by accident.

Their lives, at least to some extent, interconnect. I knew that was going to happen because that's the way these sorts of books are structured; had the stories remained separate I would have been disappointed. After all, we are told time and time again that trees act collectively. But it takes nearly a third of the book before there is any sort of linkage.  Five of these characters become part of a group of eco activists trying to halt deforestation in the United States. Their story has a plot arc which climaxes just after the two-thirds mark. The other four characters don't really become involved in the main plot, although they are also connected in some way to trees.

The final section of the book only occupies that last 5%, by which time the consequences have already been spilling over the narrative.

The story is told by head-hopping from character to character but always in the third person and in the present tense. After the Roots section, in which each character gets the whole chapter, the narrative is fragmented and sometimes it took a few paragraphs for me to work out whose perspective we were now exploring; the fact that the eco-activists adopted tree noms de guerre did not help my confusion.

It's quite preachy; there were times when it seemed to be an issue-driven novel; I would have preferred more story and less lecturing. Not that the story wasn't shocking, both in terms of the scale of the ecocide practised by the logging industry and the terrible way in which the police acted as a private army for big business. There was a lot of stuff about trees; in this way it was a bit like Moby-Dick. Perhaps Powers hoped that his book would do for trees what Melville's did for whales. 

Powers also wrote The Gold Bug Variations

Selected quotes:

Page numbers refer to the 2022 Heinemann London UK hardback edition 

• “Always the animals. First the dogs - especially the three-legged one, half wild with affection every time Nick's family pulled into the long gravel drive.” (Roots: Nicholas Hoel)
• “Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.” (Roots: Adam Appich)
• “Humans carry around legacy behaviours and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seemed like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We're all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.” (Roots: Adam Appich)
• “There is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.” (Roots: Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly)
• “It's Douggie's growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.” (Roots: Douglas Pavlicek)
• “The forest from its first day of creation. But it turns out Gilgamesh and his Punk friend Enkidu have already been through and trashed the place. Oldest story in the world.” (Roots: Douglas Pavlicek)
• “Photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act.” (Roots: Patricia Westerford)
• “For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms.” (Trunk, p158)
• “She remembers what Jesus said about the flowers, and not worrying about tomorrow. Once the nuns made every student memorize a Bible passage; she chose that one to irritate the teacher, who was big on personal responsibility. She liked the Jesus who would appall every law-abiding, property-acquiring American Christian. Jesus the Communist, the crazed shop-trasher, the friend of deadbeats.” (Trunk, pp 160 - 161)
• “Myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.” (Trunk, p162)
• “There comes a moment ... when you must turn your pretty backwater sector of the universe into a revenue stream.” (Trunk, p191)
• “As with running a business, the point is to keep playing for as long as possible.” (Trunk, p193)
• “Large men with legible biceps.” (Trunk, p199)
• “The person in your life's passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.” (Trunk, p199)
• “She's no warier of him than a lake’s surface is wary of the wind.” (Trunk, p200)
• “The hour smells moist and loamy, and the soil hums under his bare feet.” (Trunk, p362)
• “A Midas problem. Everything’s dying a gold-plated death.” (Trunk, p377)

September 2024; 502 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Age of Light" by Whitney Scharer

 

A fictionalised biography of Lee Miller, a model, photographer, and journalist. It focuses on the three years she spent in Paris as the assistant, student, collaborator and lover of Man Ray but there are also glimpses of the many other aspects of her life.

She must have been a truly remarkable person. She was raped by an uncle, contracting gonorrhoea from the encounter, when she was seven. Her modelling career began with her father taking nude photographs of her when she was a teenager; it took off when, about to step into the road in New York, she was saved from being hit by a car by Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue; it ended when a shot of her was used in an advert for menstrual pads. She went to Paris at the end of the 1920s to become an artist and ended up working and living with Man Ray. This was the height of surrealism. She discovered the technique of solarization which became a feature of the photographs of Man Ray and her. (The book credits her with discovering the technique but it would be more correct to say that she rediscovered it, it had previously been described in print in 1859.) The book suggests that she left Man Ray after he claimed credit for some photographs of a girl's head in a Bell Jar (I wonder whether this photo suggested the title of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath?) which won a prize; she felt that he was trying to control her. Whilst in Paris she also acted in one of Jean Cocteau's films and modelled for the French Vogue.

Her subsequent career was with the English Vogue. She was first a fashion photographer and correspondent and then a photo-journalist, at first during the London Blitz and then joining the American troops after the D-Day landings. She took a picture in St Malo of the first US use of napalm. She took photographs in the newly liberated Dachau. She had her photograph taken in Hitler's bath on the day he committed suicide. After the war she reinvented herself as a cordon bleu chef and cookery correspondent, marrying the man who founded the Institute for Contemporary Arts.

The novel is written from Lee's perspective, in the third person and using the present tense. This gives us access to Lee's thoughts, while at the same time creating a distance between the reader and the narrator. The principal characters, Lee and Man Ray, are both given depth and nuanced complexity. For all his role as principal antagonist and de facto villain, he is shown to be deeply in love with Lee and he perhaps understands her (especially regarding her father's abusive behaviour) better than she understands herself. 

The final chapter suggests that the pair of them meet in 1974 "forty years since they last saw each other" which heightens the drama but is contradicted by other accounts.

The technique of focusing heavily on three years in a long life makes for an interesting novel but I wondered whether the flashbacks and flashforwards contributed much to the overall book.

Selected quotes:

• “She told him that until he puts a sidewalk on the downs and lines it with cafe bars, she's not going to be wasting her time tromping through the hillsides.” (Prologue)
• “She ... panicked, as if her life were a balloon and she had just let go of the string.” (Ch 1)
• “Her letters read like excerpts from an Anita Loos novel, full of non sequiturs and gossip.” (Ch 8)
• “The next day, Lee wakes up with a clear head, and it feels like a gift to have the energy for everyday tasks. Why doesn't she appreciate it more when she is healthy?” (Ch 9)
• “When I look at a picture of you, I want to feel exactly as good as I felt when I was taking the picture. Photography can capture reality, but how does it capture emotion? Isn't the emotion what makes reality real?” (Ch 14)
• “The Illuminated moths wings of her lungs inside her chest, shot through with cancer.” (Sussex England)

September 2024; 367 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Click here for an article in the Guardian about Lee's war work (and the war photography of other women).