by John le Carré
288 pages, Scribner
Review by Kate Kasserman
This turned out to be not in the slightest the book I was in the mood for and the book I hoped to read, and I am grateful for that. The Looking Glass War is kind of one of those stories that makes you want to resign from the species. Perhaps that does not sound like a recommendation, but it is.
It is about pettiness and failure, and the bitter, mean viciousness and stupidity that are too often the only product of yearning and striving for something great. You have been warned.
The setting is the 1970s. The Department is a British intelligence organization that deals with purely military matters; it was a Big Deal during WWII, but since then, not so much. It is a shrunken thing, largely forgotten, with a small, somnolent staff, and its only claim to glory these days is clinging to its wartime rivalry with the political-espionage outfit the Circus, whose fortunes have blossomed, yea verily bloated, with the Cold War. Right from the outset, this rivalry is deeply depressing. The Circus is massively funded, well-connected, on top of its game. The Department is like a heap of wet rags that you realize is actually a degraded person only when you step on it by accident. Oh dear, was the damp urine? You’d like to think that the wealthy, well-fed Circus wouldn’t stoop to fight a “rival” like that. You really would.
The Department wants to prove itself. Is desperate to prove itself. And it seems like it may have gotten its chance. Some profoundly fishy semi-hint from an “informant” who has subsequently vanished into smoke suggests the possibility that the Soviets have installed rocket launchers in Nowheresville, East Germany (Rostock, technically), which, if true, would indicate the first signs of a direct military threat to the West. Military threat? The Department is ON IT, bitchez!!! Heap of wet rags to the rescue.
The Department pays a Scandinavian commercial pilot to accidentally fly over Rostock and take photographs of whazzup there. This film is successfully (if bumblingly) handed over to an unpleasant Department operative who is then smacked into oblivion by a car when walking to his hotel. Accident or murder? (Spoiler alert: we never find out. Everyone is too incompetent.)
John Avery is a 32-year-old aide to the director of the Department (too young to have known the glory years, too naïve to have realized when he began his career that he was hitching himself to a burnt-out star), and, despite that he has no operational experience – evidently, the Department’s only operational agent has just been squished by the errant Citroën – is tasked with retrieving the dead man’s effects in order to get his hands on those interesting photographs.
Some of the reasons he fails are manifestly not his fault. Perhaps all of them are. The local authorities and diplomatic staff are briefly confused and then deeply contemptuous of Avery’s sad attempt at deception, which really is pathetic – but then Avery has no idea what he’s doing. He has no experience and received no meaningful training beyond a basic exhortation to wing it, and the Department has screwed up even the most basic issues (like…the “next of kin” that Avery is pretending to be actually does not have a legal right to the dead man’s possessions, only the body). In that sense, Avery’s utter incompetence helps him out a bit, because they’re onto him in microseconds and let him have the dead guy’s stuff anyway. No film.
It does not occur to Avery even in passing to examine the site where the man was hit to see if the film might have been knocked a distance. Instead, the Department moves right into “we need to train and infiltrate an operative into East Germany to get a firsthand look at things.” And so it begins, going from worse to worser yet. The Department has no flaming idea what it’s doing, it’s been so long out of the game, but it does see an opportunity for prestige and resources. It doesn’t get much of either, but it certainly plumes itself plenty on the chewed-over scraps.
One would say that the operation had no meaningful effect, except that it does result in one (well, two, eventually, and possibly more) people dying who would otherwise probably have had entirely pleasant, productive, and inoffensive lives and gives the Department some bureaucratic small change to feel important with.
Here you go, le Carré seems to be saying. You want to know what intelligence work is really like? Le voila!
Showing posts with label Kate Kasserman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kate Kasserman. Show all posts
March 5, 2011
July 2, 2010
THE SPY
by James Fenimore Cooper
448 pages, Nonsuch
Review by Kate Kasserman
The Spy is not Cooper’s first novel, but it was his first big success. While it isn’t nearly as famous as his later books (to wit, it is pretty much totally ignored in their shadow – but at least it is readily available, unlike that first book of his, heh), and justly so, it is engaging and fun right up until the third act, when things abruptly get a little silly. But that point I just wanted to see what happened to all the characters, so I sighed and got on with it.
The story is set in New York in the waning days of the American Revolution, where a prosperous upper-middle-class sort of family is living anxiously in the no-man’s land outside NYC. The family’s loyalties are divided, but nobody takes it very seriously (within the family, at least) because two of the only people who actually pick a side are unmarried daughters, and who cares about their political opinions? The girls don’t even take their distinction to heart; the younger, Frances is a Patriot in love with a rebel officer, and Sarah is a Loyalist in love with an English officer, and they figure that their political views are simply a reflection of their romantic prospects. Mr. Wharton, the father, really cares only that he isn’t going to be ruined by the war (a constant and very real possibility) by getting in dutch with one side or the other.
Anyway, things get messy when the son comes home for a visit. He hasn’t seen his family in a year and a half, because he’s a captain in His Majesty’s service and has been rather busy. But he gets leave at last, and everything seems fine, except, yoicks! The lines shift (they did this a lot in New York all throughout the war) and what should have been a pleasant stroll turns into having to cross the Continental (Patriot) pickets. So Captain Wharton decides, oh what the hell, he’ll put on a disguise and get a pass from a notorious Tory spy, Harvey Birch, who always seems to be able to get his hands on anything. Yes, even a pass to cross the Continental lines. Birch comes through, the disguised Captain Wharton whistles his way through the lines, and he’s home for a visit, yay! But – not yay, because the Continentals are searching houses (looking for Birch, actually, who has escaped from them before and really, really frosts them) and come across Captain Wharton in his dopey-looking civilian clothes and trashy wig (and an eye-patch yet – the dude does not do “subtle,” evidently). If an enemy soldier gets caught in battle or in uniform, it’s kind of a meh. His name will go on a list, and he’ll be paroled or traded or whatever, and nobody loses much sleep over it.
But if he is caught in disguise, he is automatically slotted as a spy, and can (and very likely will) be hanged after the most summary of trials. So this is what Captain Wharton is looking at, which very much sucks.
We follow the Whartons and their tribulations and the vicissitudes of the girls’ love lives (well, whodathunkit, “spoiler” here: Frances’s Patriot beau is a good guy, and Sarah’s Englishman is a scurvy twerp), and Frances’s romance and Captain Wharton’s ultimate fate drive the engine of the plot. However – neither of them is the real protagonist of the piece. That is Harvey Birch, the aforementioned Tory spy.
The whole book, really, is wrestling with the issue of spying. Right, the title. So, here comes another spoiler, which is in fact no sort of spoiler whatsoever if you read Cooper’s introduction: Birch is working for Washington. He is not exactly a double-agent, because his loyalty is very clearly with the American side, but he is on the British payroll and does pass minor secrets to them in order to keep his bona fides (and consequently access) solid.
There are a lot of things we would have been screwed without during that war, and a vast network of spies is one of them. It was tricky stuff, because the “just hang him, he is a sneak and a liar and therefore dishonorable” attitude was a bit on the inflexible-ish side back then (as well as in Cooper’s day in the early 19th century). To take on the role of a spy was to throw away your honor and good name. That is a sacrifice far greater than one’s life, and Cooper set out to redeem this despised class.
He is pretty melodramatic about it. Birch suffers some viciously cruel tortures (with their concomitant rhetorical moral purifying effect), such as being attacked and robbed by a band of so-called Patriot thugs in his own home while his father – Birch’s one personal attachment – lies dying in the next room. And Birch becomes positively saintly and nearly omnipotent when coming to the defense of our Unambiguously Virtuous characters (moral purification through association).
While Birch remains a cipher in the minds of the characters we follow (we never, ever get inside Birch’s head, a clever and effective choice) and the plot is brewing rather than resolving, the book is pretty strong. Cooper is quite good at vivid secondary characters, and really comes into his own when describing people who are a bit good and a bit bad, while his All-Goods can get a bit tiresome. However, do be prepared that an early 19th-century aesthetic can be rather…rough. His mockery of the uneducated can come across as fairly strong stuff to a modern eye, and we have jokes like…well, let’s just say that the punchline of one involves a child dying of tetanus.
But once our main characters know for sure that Birch is on the side of the angels (the angels, I say!), things start to go flat. There are some charming moments, like Birch’s impersonation of a late 18th-century Holy Roller – I am sorry, there is no way to have THAT much Hellfire and “you are damned” without its being funny. However, once Birch’s ultimate purity becomes manifest, the high-minded monologues and pose-striking can get somewhat wearing. I will admit, though, that one of Birch’s didactic moments got to me, almost enough to redeem the rest of ’em. It is very near the end of the book (the actual end is a coda where Birch gets the reward of a clean death in battle as a yes, yes, we see symbolic representation of his honor – even if it is the War of 1812), where Birch is confabbing with General Washington. The war is over, but whatever Birch has done in the course of his spying must evidently remain secret forever so that people are not compromised. Birch has lost everything (cf. previous robbery), and Washington tries to give him a fat bag of money to live on, but Birch refuses it. Washington then lectures him gently (a-gain) on how he has to keep shtum about the fact that he was working on the Patriot side.
“…I have told you that the characters of men who are much esteemed in life depend on your secrecy; what pledge can I give them of your fidelity?”
“Tell them,” said Birch, advancing and unconsciously resting one foot on the bag, “tell them that I would not take the gold!”
448 pages, Nonsuch
Review by Kate Kasserman
The Spy is not Cooper’s first novel, but it was his first big success. While it isn’t nearly as famous as his later books (to wit, it is pretty much totally ignored in their shadow – but at least it is readily available, unlike that first book of his, heh), and justly so, it is engaging and fun right up until the third act, when things abruptly get a little silly. But that point I just wanted to see what happened to all the characters, so I sighed and got on with it.
The story is set in New York in the waning days of the American Revolution, where a prosperous upper-middle-class sort of family is living anxiously in the no-man’s land outside NYC. The family’s loyalties are divided, but nobody takes it very seriously (within the family, at least) because two of the only people who actually pick a side are unmarried daughters, and who cares about their political opinions? The girls don’t even take their distinction to heart; the younger, Frances is a Patriot in love with a rebel officer, and Sarah is a Loyalist in love with an English officer, and they figure that their political views are simply a reflection of their romantic prospects. Mr. Wharton, the father, really cares only that he isn’t going to be ruined by the war (a constant and very real possibility) by getting in dutch with one side or the other.
Anyway, things get messy when the son comes home for a visit. He hasn’t seen his family in a year and a half, because he’s a captain in His Majesty’s service and has been rather busy. But he gets leave at last, and everything seems fine, except, yoicks! The lines shift (they did this a lot in New York all throughout the war) and what should have been a pleasant stroll turns into having to cross the Continental (Patriot) pickets. So Captain Wharton decides, oh what the hell, he’ll put on a disguise and get a pass from a notorious Tory spy, Harvey Birch, who always seems to be able to get his hands on anything. Yes, even a pass to cross the Continental lines. Birch comes through, the disguised Captain Wharton whistles his way through the lines, and he’s home for a visit, yay! But – not yay, because the Continentals are searching houses (looking for Birch, actually, who has escaped from them before and really, really frosts them) and come across Captain Wharton in his dopey-looking civilian clothes and trashy wig (and an eye-patch yet – the dude does not do “subtle,” evidently). If an enemy soldier gets caught in battle or in uniform, it’s kind of a meh. His name will go on a list, and he’ll be paroled or traded or whatever, and nobody loses much sleep over it.
But if he is caught in disguise, he is automatically slotted as a spy, and can (and very likely will) be hanged after the most summary of trials. So this is what Captain Wharton is looking at, which very much sucks.
We follow the Whartons and their tribulations and the vicissitudes of the girls’ love lives (well, whodathunkit, “spoiler” here: Frances’s Patriot beau is a good guy, and Sarah’s Englishman is a scurvy twerp), and Frances’s romance and Captain Wharton’s ultimate fate drive the engine of the plot. However – neither of them is the real protagonist of the piece. That is Harvey Birch, the aforementioned Tory spy.
The whole book, really, is wrestling with the issue of spying. Right, the title. So, here comes another spoiler, which is in fact no sort of spoiler whatsoever if you read Cooper’s introduction: Birch is working for Washington. He is not exactly a double-agent, because his loyalty is very clearly with the American side, but he is on the British payroll and does pass minor secrets to them in order to keep his bona fides (and consequently access) solid.
There are a lot of things we would have been screwed without during that war, and a vast network of spies is one of them. It was tricky stuff, because the “just hang him, he is a sneak and a liar and therefore dishonorable” attitude was a bit on the inflexible-ish side back then (as well as in Cooper’s day in the early 19th century). To take on the role of a spy was to throw away your honor and good name. That is a sacrifice far greater than one’s life, and Cooper set out to redeem this despised class.
He is pretty melodramatic about it. Birch suffers some viciously cruel tortures (with their concomitant rhetorical moral purifying effect), such as being attacked and robbed by a band of so-called Patriot thugs in his own home while his father – Birch’s one personal attachment – lies dying in the next room. And Birch becomes positively saintly and nearly omnipotent when coming to the defense of our Unambiguously Virtuous characters (moral purification through association).
While Birch remains a cipher in the minds of the characters we follow (we never, ever get inside Birch’s head, a clever and effective choice) and the plot is brewing rather than resolving, the book is pretty strong. Cooper is quite good at vivid secondary characters, and really comes into his own when describing people who are a bit good and a bit bad, while his All-Goods can get a bit tiresome. However, do be prepared that an early 19th-century aesthetic can be rather…rough. His mockery of the uneducated can come across as fairly strong stuff to a modern eye, and we have jokes like…well, let’s just say that the punchline of one involves a child dying of tetanus.
But once our main characters know for sure that Birch is on the side of the angels (the angels, I say!), things start to go flat. There are some charming moments, like Birch’s impersonation of a late 18th-century Holy Roller – I am sorry, there is no way to have THAT much Hellfire and “you are damned” without its being funny. However, once Birch’s ultimate purity becomes manifest, the high-minded monologues and pose-striking can get somewhat wearing. I will admit, though, that one of Birch’s didactic moments got to me, almost enough to redeem the rest of ’em. It is very near the end of the book (the actual end is a coda where Birch gets the reward of a clean death in battle as a yes, yes, we see symbolic representation of his honor – even if it is the War of 1812), where Birch is confabbing with General Washington. The war is over, but whatever Birch has done in the course of his spying must evidently remain secret forever so that people are not compromised. Birch has lost everything (cf. previous robbery), and Washington tries to give him a fat bag of money to live on, but Birch refuses it. Washington then lectures him gently (a-gain) on how he has to keep shtum about the fact that he was working on the Patriot side.
“…I have told you that the characters of men who are much esteemed in life depend on your secrecy; what pledge can I give them of your fidelity?”
“Tell them,” said Birch, advancing and unconsciously resting one foot on the bag, “tell them that I would not take the gold!”
June 5, 2010
DANTE’S EQUATION
by Jane Jensen
608 pages, Del Rey
Review by Kate Kasserman
Dante’s Equation is a crazy ambitious mix of a whole lotta ideas and a whole lotta characters. Among others: ambitious hardscrabble scientists, religious ideologues, nasty government operatives (both US and Israel), dead geniuses (or apparently dead, heh), kabbalah, a spoiled rich-kid tabloid reporter going for the story of his life (not that he cares about journalism, but to prove at least the possibility of his innocence of the childhood crime of which he is suspected), and a mucho dangerous secret experiment that accidently plays fiddle-dee-dee with the true fundamental law of the universe…which turns out to be (mini-spoiler!) the balance between good and evil. Oh yeah, and Nazis, although for once they’re not the ones trying to wreak havoc by blasting off mysticoscientific cannon-fire.
The basic premise is that Dr. Jill Talcott is trying to make a name for herself as a physicist by proving – experimentally, mind you – an out-there theory first developed by her mentor, now dead. As previously suggested, this is not as good an idea as she thinks it is. Because she wants to debut with a big splashy “wow” moment, she doesn’t tell anyone except her smokin’ hot assistant what she’s up to. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t know; for one, we’ve got this shadowy Dept. of Defense operator who trawls around sniffing out promising weapons research, and he gets wind of Talcott’s dead mentor’s innnnnnteresting work, and from there, he’s on Talcott’s trail.
That would be trouble enough, except that the prescient Old Testament has tagged Talcott’s name For Further Attention, because – well, she could basically destroy everything, which is bad. So a rigid Israeli Bible code nerd ends up coming for her too. And he unthinkingly clues in the Mossad to his interesting research, so the Mossad is after…hm, pretty much everybody. They want the super-weapon first! We also follow along the aforementioned jerky reporter, who ends up in the mix because he’s trying to piece together a fragmented manuscript written by a frighteningly brilliant Polish Jew who finished his magnum opus while interned in Auschwitz (from which, puzzlingly, he seems to have escaped by just kind of…disappearing one day – disappear not like “hey, he’s gone!” but like flash-of-light dematerialization). The manuscript is related because it contains the same do-not-touch-please theory that Talcott is working on.
The down side of following quite so many characters and threads (although they do all come together) is pretty much the one you’d expect: I was curious what was going to happen, but I didn’t feel all that drawn to any of the individual characters. But there can be a huge up side to such a broad canvas, and that happened here too. This book surprised me (as to how, I will not say, because surprises are fun!). I could have, and in fact very much did, quibble with the mechanics and implications of the big surprise, but I was so happy to be knocked sideways like that, I didn’t really mind.
The ending is a bit hasty, but that was all right too – I’d seen some remarkably weird stuff along the way, and all I really required was for it to be tied up in a bow.
608 pages, Del Rey
Review by Kate Kasserman
Dante’s Equation is a crazy ambitious mix of a whole lotta ideas and a whole lotta characters. Among others: ambitious hardscrabble scientists, religious ideologues, nasty government operatives (both US and Israel), dead geniuses (or apparently dead, heh), kabbalah, a spoiled rich-kid tabloid reporter going for the story of his life (not that he cares about journalism, but to prove at least the possibility of his innocence of the childhood crime of which he is suspected), and a mucho dangerous secret experiment that accidently plays fiddle-dee-dee with the true fundamental law of the universe…which turns out to be (mini-spoiler!) the balance between good and evil. Oh yeah, and Nazis, although for once they’re not the ones trying to wreak havoc by blasting off mysticoscientific cannon-fire.
The basic premise is that Dr. Jill Talcott is trying to make a name for herself as a physicist by proving – experimentally, mind you – an out-there theory first developed by her mentor, now dead. As previously suggested, this is not as good an idea as she thinks it is. Because she wants to debut with a big splashy “wow” moment, she doesn’t tell anyone except her smokin’ hot assistant what she’s up to. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t know; for one, we’ve got this shadowy Dept. of Defense operator who trawls around sniffing out promising weapons research, and he gets wind of Talcott’s dead mentor’s innnnnnteresting work, and from there, he’s on Talcott’s trail.
That would be trouble enough, except that the prescient Old Testament has tagged Talcott’s name For Further Attention, because – well, she could basically destroy everything, which is bad. So a rigid Israeli Bible code nerd ends up coming for her too. And he unthinkingly clues in the Mossad to his interesting research, so the Mossad is after…hm, pretty much everybody. They want the super-weapon first! We also follow along the aforementioned jerky reporter, who ends up in the mix because he’s trying to piece together a fragmented manuscript written by a frighteningly brilliant Polish Jew who finished his magnum opus while interned in Auschwitz (from which, puzzlingly, he seems to have escaped by just kind of…disappearing one day – disappear not like “hey, he’s gone!” but like flash-of-light dematerialization). The manuscript is related because it contains the same do-not-touch-please theory that Talcott is working on.
The down side of following quite so many characters and threads (although they do all come together) is pretty much the one you’d expect: I was curious what was going to happen, but I didn’t feel all that drawn to any of the individual characters. But there can be a huge up side to such a broad canvas, and that happened here too. This book surprised me (as to how, I will not say, because surprises are fun!). I could have, and in fact very much did, quibble with the mechanics and implications of the big surprise, but I was so happy to be knocked sideways like that, I didn’t really mind.
The ending is a bit hasty, but that was all right too – I’d seen some remarkably weird stuff along the way, and all I really required was for it to be tied up in a bow.
June 3, 2010
THE COLLAPSIUM
by Wil McCarthy
428 pages, Bantam
Review by Kate Kasserman
For a book set several centuries in the future, The Collapsium is remarkably old-fashioned. What is unusual, and a pleasant surprise, is the old upon which it was fashioned: I don’t know whether this was by intent, but it is very like the overheated pulps of the 1940s. Not an homage, not an updating – just the same sort of spirit, but in a modern book. Characters are Broad, ideas are Plentiful and Large (and land o’ mercy, is there ever some science-nerd wonkery in here), consistency is…you know, it is best just to roll with it. It’s about the coolness, not about filling in the blanks. Characters are types (happily, they are rather odd types), and there is never the slightest doubt that the White Hats are going to come out on top. Even if hundreds of millions of people die along the way, which, whoa, they do.
Our hero is Bruno de Towaji, and although he does get a big fight scene near the end, he is far from the oiled-and-shirtless type of sci-fi pulp hero. He is a scientist, and he is socially inept not in the “What? Do? You? Mean? I! Will! Hit! You!” manner but the more ordinary mega-dork one, where all he wants to do, after becoming fabulously wealthy by making humanity immortal (well, heh, not wholly immortal, as previously referred to) and opening up the solar system to colonization through his inventions, is retreat to a teensy little fortress of solitude he has constructed – his own private mini-planet – and work on some weird, difficult, and probably fairly pointless science experiment (opening a gateway to peek at the end of time – because, you know, It Is There).
What gets the action going is an engineering problem. Heh, that doesn’t sound sexy, but it is an engineering problem that could annihilate the solar system, which is unfortunately as far as humanity has spread, so, you know…it is a big deal. Tamra Lutui, the Queen (we have lapsed to monarchy in the future, I am sorry to say) and de Towaji’s old flame has the temerity to interrupt his solitude and ripple the surface of his physics-contemplating mind because it seems that no one else is quite smart or experienced enough to deal with a super-cool building project that has gone awry (a structure composed of micro black holes, basically, ringing the sun, which will meaningfully increase the speed at which we can transmit communications and material). Which is half-finished and has gone unbalanced. Which means that instead of sitting nicely around the sun, it is falling into it. And I think I mentioned those micro black holes. De Towaji sighs, dusts himself off, and solves ring collapsiter potential disaster #1…but then, lo and behold, disaster #2 follows…and then disaster #3. No, it is not just silly engineering oopsies like all projects run into from time to time. It is a saboteur. And that is all I shall say about that, although you won’t have trouble guessing the culprit (nor do I believe are you intended to). We know de Towaji’s brain is BIG – but is it big ENOUGH? Nerd-fight! Along the way, there is much strangeness, which keeps the story engaging even though the central plot is fairly light.
If you remember the original Star Trek series, you probably also remember that transporters “beamed” people around by…ack…actually DESTROYING the original and reconstituting it at the desired destination. Well, that is the kind of immortality we have in The Collapsium – people fax themselves wherever they want to go (and as with the faxes with which we are familiar, both a send and receive station are required), and when they step into a fax, zoop, they are poofed out of existence and reduced to a pattern, and then that pattern poofs a new “them” at the other side. Because the pattern is storable, people can run off as many copies as they like of themselves. And if someone dies, a backup is poofed into existence and can be off and running, albeit with a slight memory gap. (That is what is behind the real deaths late in the book; it isn’t just the bodies being variously destroyed, nobody cares about THOSE old things: it is the patterns that are annihilated, and there’s no coming back from that.)
So it is a strange sort of immortality, one that dispenses with continuity, and that raises far more questions than are answered or even referred to glancingly in the book. For example, one of the obvious aspects – what does one do with all those me-copies – does get answered: the designated original has absolute power of life or death over all copies, and while multiple selves can be “merged” in a fax machine into a new composite self, a copy has no guarantee that it won’t just be…destroyed. Yep, destroyed. The fate of most of ’em. So it is an answer that raises a whole lot more questions.
And that is actually a latent, and rather lovely, theme running through the book. You identify a goal, and you work towards it, and that is fine – but in the process of doing stuff, you churn up all sorts of side consequences. Sometimes what happens on the side is a lot bigger and more interesting, even, than the goal. Sometimes it’s horrible, sometimes fantastic, usually a mix – but it can never be controlled. Even in the future, we’re a long way from that. Dangerous, yes – but our only real hope, too.
428 pages, Bantam
Review by Kate Kasserman
For a book set several centuries in the future, The Collapsium is remarkably old-fashioned. What is unusual, and a pleasant surprise, is the old upon which it was fashioned: I don’t know whether this was by intent, but it is very like the overheated pulps of the 1940s. Not an homage, not an updating – just the same sort of spirit, but in a modern book. Characters are Broad, ideas are Plentiful and Large (and land o’ mercy, is there ever some science-nerd wonkery in here), consistency is…you know, it is best just to roll with it. It’s about the coolness, not about filling in the blanks. Characters are types (happily, they are rather odd types), and there is never the slightest doubt that the White Hats are going to come out on top. Even if hundreds of millions of people die along the way, which, whoa, they do.
Our hero is Bruno de Towaji, and although he does get a big fight scene near the end, he is far from the oiled-and-shirtless type of sci-fi pulp hero. He is a scientist, and he is socially inept not in the “What? Do? You? Mean? I! Will! Hit! You!” manner but the more ordinary mega-dork one, where all he wants to do, after becoming fabulously wealthy by making humanity immortal (well, heh, not wholly immortal, as previously referred to) and opening up the solar system to colonization through his inventions, is retreat to a teensy little fortress of solitude he has constructed – his own private mini-planet – and work on some weird, difficult, and probably fairly pointless science experiment (opening a gateway to peek at the end of time – because, you know, It Is There).
What gets the action going is an engineering problem. Heh, that doesn’t sound sexy, but it is an engineering problem that could annihilate the solar system, which is unfortunately as far as humanity has spread, so, you know…it is a big deal. Tamra Lutui, the Queen (we have lapsed to monarchy in the future, I am sorry to say) and de Towaji’s old flame has the temerity to interrupt his solitude and ripple the surface of his physics-contemplating mind because it seems that no one else is quite smart or experienced enough to deal with a super-cool building project that has gone awry (a structure composed of micro black holes, basically, ringing the sun, which will meaningfully increase the speed at which we can transmit communications and material). Which is half-finished and has gone unbalanced. Which means that instead of sitting nicely around the sun, it is falling into it. And I think I mentioned those micro black holes. De Towaji sighs, dusts himself off, and solves ring collapsiter potential disaster #1…but then, lo and behold, disaster #2 follows…and then disaster #3. No, it is not just silly engineering oopsies like all projects run into from time to time. It is a saboteur. And that is all I shall say about that, although you won’t have trouble guessing the culprit (nor do I believe are you intended to). We know de Towaji’s brain is BIG – but is it big ENOUGH? Nerd-fight! Along the way, there is much strangeness, which keeps the story engaging even though the central plot is fairly light.
If you remember the original Star Trek series, you probably also remember that transporters “beamed” people around by…ack…actually DESTROYING the original and reconstituting it at the desired destination. Well, that is the kind of immortality we have in The Collapsium – people fax themselves wherever they want to go (and as with the faxes with which we are familiar, both a send and receive station are required), and when they step into a fax, zoop, they are poofed out of existence and reduced to a pattern, and then that pattern poofs a new “them” at the other side. Because the pattern is storable, people can run off as many copies as they like of themselves. And if someone dies, a backup is poofed into existence and can be off and running, albeit with a slight memory gap. (That is what is behind the real deaths late in the book; it isn’t just the bodies being variously destroyed, nobody cares about THOSE old things: it is the patterns that are annihilated, and there’s no coming back from that.)
So it is a strange sort of immortality, one that dispenses with continuity, and that raises far more questions than are answered or even referred to glancingly in the book. For example, one of the obvious aspects – what does one do with all those me-copies – does get answered: the designated original has absolute power of life or death over all copies, and while multiple selves can be “merged” in a fax machine into a new composite self, a copy has no guarantee that it won’t just be…destroyed. Yep, destroyed. The fate of most of ’em. So it is an answer that raises a whole lot more questions.
And that is actually a latent, and rather lovely, theme running through the book. You identify a goal, and you work towards it, and that is fine – but in the process of doing stuff, you churn up all sorts of side consequences. Sometimes what happens on the side is a lot bigger and more interesting, even, than the goal. Sometimes it’s horrible, sometimes fantastic, usually a mix – but it can never be controlled. Even in the future, we’re a long way from that. Dangerous, yes – but our only real hope, too.
May 28, 2010
CITY OF GLORY
A Novel of War and Desire in Old Manhattan
by Beverly Swerling
512 pages, Simon & Schuster
Review by Kate Kasserman
The sequel to City of Dreams, City of Glory takes place almost wholly over the course of a week and a half in 1814 rather than the hundred-plus years of CoD, and I had high hopes that most of my complaints about that prior novel would be magically whisked away by concentrating the action on a single basic plot-line and set of characters (yes, I know, old-fashioned that way, me). However, I find myself doing a perfect volte face. Swerling did better, in my view, with the loosely connected vignettes after all; the mini storylets gave her the liberty to be rather (!) melodramatic and to digress on points of technical research interest without any of it seeming overbearing or tangential. While there’s a lot to like about City of Glory, the history-wonk stuff and the over-the-top “because it suits the plot, that’s why he did it” characterizations and motivations ended up being a bit much-ish. The book is a reasonably fun and certainly readable way to bone up on New York City towards the end of the War of 1812, but if I weren’t into that kind of thing (which I am), I might’ve chucked it across the room (and then picked it up again, because a book has to be REALLY awful for me not to need to know what happens…and City of Glory certainly isn’t that).
The action centers on Joyful Patrick Turner, our latest entry in the intertwined Turner-Devrey families. Joyful is a talented surgeon, per the Turner trope, but for once not the bestest bestest ever, and anyway it becomes moot when his left hand gets atomized by a British cannonball. He won’t reduce himself to doctoring (which is basically slappin’ leeches on people) because he thinks it’s a damned waste of time and doesn’t do his patients any good, so he decides to make hay with the fact that he was raised mostly in Canton and consequently expects he can do pretty well as a China trader. Also, he needs money so that he can marry the hot Huguenot babe he’s jonesing for.
The love story I found fairly reprehensible. Without getting into heavy spoiler territory, while Joyful is mooning over the golden-haired, ladylike, preternaturally intelligent Manon, he’s banging the madam of a cathouse that he helped her set up and of which he remains (secretly) part-owner. That madam is a light-skinned runaway slave returned to New York with a new name, and she is desperately in love with Joyful. Joyful’s rationalization of his behavior is along the lines of, “Oh well, I can’t help loving who I love, and I just don’t love the madam, so it’s onto Miss Perfect with me! In the meantime, I don’t quite want to end it yet (seems awkward), so let’s keep doing it. I feel bad about it though, so we’ll reduce the frequency slightly.” It is certainly a valid point to make about how many people selfishly (and lazily) behave, but it struck me as out of place in a melodrama. Joyful did not endear himself to me much, despite many set-pieces where he Does The Right Thing (barring with his wimminfolk). The story does not help, further, by being so cruel to the soon-to-be-discarded mistress, and having her suffer some quite remarkably unpleasant events, while Miss Golden of course remains largely untouched.
Anyway, Joyful isn’t starting off with enough cash, and he needs to wriggle and scheme to get the goods to set himself up as a trader – which puts him, frequently all but inexplicably, on a collision course with Nefarious Others who want to do Everything Bad, including destroy the freshly hatched and very struggling United States. Swerling trots out a wide range of people and constituencies of the time – traders, the desperately poor of all races, financiers, forgers, working girls, homeless weirdoes, child laborers, pirates, jewelers, Chinese, Jews, famous real people (such as Jacob Astor and Dolley Madison), cops, blackbirders (scummy gangs that kidnap anyone any shade of brown darker than milk to sell them as escaped slaves, whether they are or not) – and while she has a vivid touch in making these people recognizable, a lot of them seemed to have been thrown into the mix on the flimsiest of pretexts. There are long subplots whose relationship to, well, ANYTHING was tenuous at best. Thumbless Wu is a standout here – a Chinese stowaway who gave up untold wealth in his homeland to STARVE in America because he heard that “you can get anything here” and he wants to set up as an opium trader – has anyone EVER been QUITE that stupid? – and yet who becomes brilliant to the point of positively psychic in figuring out that laudanum is also an opiate – all this aside from the fact that it has only the tiniest blessed thing to do with anything else. (I am stretching, even, by saying that it does have a tiny relationship; what the whole Thumbless Wu angle serves is to give a reason for a certain captain to be fired from his post, which could just as well have happened for no reason, or one without scores of pages devoted to an elaborate backstory.)
It is always a temptation, when you study a period of history in-depth, to want to throw everything interesting you discover into the mix. I think that’s what happened here. Trivial details, like the fact that women’s drawers were crotchless at the time (yours would be too, I think, if you had all them thar skirts and were aiming for a chamber-pot), get brought up repeatedly and with undue attention. A whole excursion with the British force that burned our capital is utterly irrelevant to the story. It lets Swerling bring in the delicious true-life fact about how Dolley Madison remained in the White House till the VERY last second when the troops were marching her way, and delayed herself yet further by insisting upon freeing the enormous and hard-to-manage the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington (good call, too, since the lobsterbacks torched the place). It’s a cool little tidbit, but really, it just wasn’t necessary (in the book), and working it into the story feels contrived.
All in all, I suppose, City of Glory is an amuse-bouche, of remarkable size. The detail and the range of characters are highly engaging; the plot and people require a dedicated and oft-renewed suspension of disbelief. Still, I have to admit that I had a pretty good time.
by Beverly Swerling
512 pages, Simon & Schuster
Review by Kate Kasserman
The sequel to City of Dreams, City of Glory takes place almost wholly over the course of a week and a half in 1814 rather than the hundred-plus years of CoD, and I had high hopes that most of my complaints about that prior novel would be magically whisked away by concentrating the action on a single basic plot-line and set of characters (yes, I know, old-fashioned that way, me). However, I find myself doing a perfect volte face. Swerling did better, in my view, with the loosely connected vignettes after all; the mini storylets gave her the liberty to be rather (!) melodramatic and to digress on points of technical research interest without any of it seeming overbearing or tangential. While there’s a lot to like about City of Glory, the history-wonk stuff and the over-the-top “because it suits the plot, that’s why he did it” characterizations and motivations ended up being a bit much-ish. The book is a reasonably fun and certainly readable way to bone up on New York City towards the end of the War of 1812, but if I weren’t into that kind of thing (which I am), I might’ve chucked it across the room (and then picked it up again, because a book has to be REALLY awful for me not to need to know what happens…and City of Glory certainly isn’t that).
The action centers on Joyful Patrick Turner, our latest entry in the intertwined Turner-Devrey families. Joyful is a talented surgeon, per the Turner trope, but for once not the bestest bestest ever, and anyway it becomes moot when his left hand gets atomized by a British cannonball. He won’t reduce himself to doctoring (which is basically slappin’ leeches on people) because he thinks it’s a damned waste of time and doesn’t do his patients any good, so he decides to make hay with the fact that he was raised mostly in Canton and consequently expects he can do pretty well as a China trader. Also, he needs money so that he can marry the hot Huguenot babe he’s jonesing for.
The love story I found fairly reprehensible. Without getting into heavy spoiler territory, while Joyful is mooning over the golden-haired, ladylike, preternaturally intelligent Manon, he’s banging the madam of a cathouse that he helped her set up and of which he remains (secretly) part-owner. That madam is a light-skinned runaway slave returned to New York with a new name, and she is desperately in love with Joyful. Joyful’s rationalization of his behavior is along the lines of, “Oh well, I can’t help loving who I love, and I just don’t love the madam, so it’s onto Miss Perfect with me! In the meantime, I don’t quite want to end it yet (seems awkward), so let’s keep doing it. I feel bad about it though, so we’ll reduce the frequency slightly.” It is certainly a valid point to make about how many people selfishly (and lazily) behave, but it struck me as out of place in a melodrama. Joyful did not endear himself to me much, despite many set-pieces where he Does The Right Thing (barring with his wimminfolk). The story does not help, further, by being so cruel to the soon-to-be-discarded mistress, and having her suffer some quite remarkably unpleasant events, while Miss Golden of course remains largely untouched.
Anyway, Joyful isn’t starting off with enough cash, and he needs to wriggle and scheme to get the goods to set himself up as a trader – which puts him, frequently all but inexplicably, on a collision course with Nefarious Others who want to do Everything Bad, including destroy the freshly hatched and very struggling United States. Swerling trots out a wide range of people and constituencies of the time – traders, the desperately poor of all races, financiers, forgers, working girls, homeless weirdoes, child laborers, pirates, jewelers, Chinese, Jews, famous real people (such as Jacob Astor and Dolley Madison), cops, blackbirders (scummy gangs that kidnap anyone any shade of brown darker than milk to sell them as escaped slaves, whether they are or not) – and while she has a vivid touch in making these people recognizable, a lot of them seemed to have been thrown into the mix on the flimsiest of pretexts. There are long subplots whose relationship to, well, ANYTHING was tenuous at best. Thumbless Wu is a standout here – a Chinese stowaway who gave up untold wealth in his homeland to STARVE in America because he heard that “you can get anything here” and he wants to set up as an opium trader – has anyone EVER been QUITE that stupid? – and yet who becomes brilliant to the point of positively psychic in figuring out that laudanum is also an opiate – all this aside from the fact that it has only the tiniest blessed thing to do with anything else. (I am stretching, even, by saying that it does have a tiny relationship; what the whole Thumbless Wu angle serves is to give a reason for a certain captain to be fired from his post, which could just as well have happened for no reason, or one without scores of pages devoted to an elaborate backstory.)
It is always a temptation, when you study a period of history in-depth, to want to throw everything interesting you discover into the mix. I think that’s what happened here. Trivial details, like the fact that women’s drawers were crotchless at the time (yours would be too, I think, if you had all them thar skirts and were aiming for a chamber-pot), get brought up repeatedly and with undue attention. A whole excursion with the British force that burned our capital is utterly irrelevant to the story. It lets Swerling bring in the delicious true-life fact about how Dolley Madison remained in the White House till the VERY last second when the troops were marching her way, and delayed herself yet further by insisting upon freeing the enormous and hard-to-manage the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington (good call, too, since the lobsterbacks torched the place). It’s a cool little tidbit, but really, it just wasn’t necessary (in the book), and working it into the story feels contrived.
All in all, I suppose, City of Glory is an amuse-bouche, of remarkable size. The detail and the range of characters are highly engaging; the plot and people require a dedicated and oft-renewed suspension of disbelief. Still, I have to admit that I had a pretty good time.
May 17, 2010
CITY OF DREAMS
A Novel of Nieuw Amsterdam and Early Manhattan
by Beverly Swerling
592 pages, Simon & Schuster
Review by Kate Kasserman
City of Dreams starts off strong, with an English brother and sister arriving as penniless immigrants in 1661 New Amsterdam via a one-step-ahead-of-the-law sojourn in the Netherlands. Lucas is a talented barber who can’t keep his hands to himself and practices outside the bounds of what his guild permits (hence one step ahead of the law), and Sally an equally talented apothecary with a flair for whipping up laudanum, the morphine of the time. They are devoted to each other, but not for long: a series of slightly soap-opera-y (with a higher explicit violence content) events contrive to put the sibs at permanent loggerheads. Lucas forces Sally to marry the city’s only official legal physician, a mean-spirited dolt whom she loathes and who doesn’t like her much either but is addicted to her super-fine laudanum. Lucas does this for decidedly mixed reasons – the doctor will back off from his persecution of Lucas, he’ll protect Sally from the consequences of her pregnancy (she was raped, but that won’t protect her from The Glorious People – she’s still unmarried, and that is that), and…he’ll give Lucas the money he thinks he needs to marry the woman he loves. Anyway, Sally chooses to focus on the less generous aspects of Lucas’s motivation, and it is all off between them.
And then we skip forward in time, to another generation of the Turner (Lucas’s line…which is really Sally’s line, for another melodramatic twist) and Devrey (Sally’s official descendants) families. This is one of the things that kind of frustrated me about this book; it is basically several linked novellas of varying quality. When you like a set of characters, well, too bad, because they won’t be with you for long! What holds the stories together is the city of New Amsterdam/New York itself (lovingly researched, and the few anachronisms I noticed were trivial and quite defensible in the service of making the story more readable), medical history through some quite thoroughly horrifying and fascinating developments, occasionally a few points of fact from one story to the next, and that the characters who drive the story are Turners and Devreys, who never do seem quite to manage to get along. Not through the end of the eighteenth century, at least, which as far as we go in this installment of the series.
Swerling covers some awfully interesting history. Occasionally she lapses into brief info-dumps, which is probably unavoidable given how much time she covers and the big jumps between generations, but I found that pretty painless. There is, though, a weak spot in a lot of the people running through the various stories: they’re colorful, sure, but a lot of them struck me as a bit flat and one-note. People will do the Worst or Stupidest Thing Possible in a way that doesn’t feel true to an actual human being – sure, some folks suddenly go all derrrrr sometimes, but this is a lot of people doing so a lot of the time. So while the plot moves along, I didn’t always care as much as I would have liked to. I was SOAKED in suspension of disbelief about the deliciously immersive world…but the people, nah, far more frequently than I would have liked. It kept my interest in some of the stories at a remove. Still, a lot happens, and it moves quickly, so there’s always something new to look at.
A few characters, though, were top-notch: the love story between Jennet (a Turner), beautiful and with the uncanny knack for medicine that so many of her family have, and Solomon, a much-older Brazilian Jewish immigrant, ugly and a brothel-keeper (!) who’s been STALKING her since she was, like, twelve (!!!) had not a particularly deep complexity, I suppose, but a fascinating one. I mean, this is not a relationship that looks too promising when you run the numbers, and Swerling doesn’t sugar-coat Solomon’s four-alarm control-freakery and creepiness and opportunism. And yet – they genuinely love each other, and make it work remarkably well, impossibility be damned. When it comes a cropper, you know exactly why – it isn’t a contrivance for dramatic effect, for once, but because we know Solomon so well, we can see perfectly well how this (I’m not going to spoiler this corker) was one hurdle he just couldn’t get over.
I can’t help thinking that all the stories could have had this solidity and resonance, if they’d had enough time to unfold; but what there is remains interesting enough, with the promise that maybe the next books in the series will manage to populate the High Drama with more consistently believable players.
by Beverly Swerling
592 pages, Simon & Schuster
Review by Kate Kasserman
City of Dreams starts off strong, with an English brother and sister arriving as penniless immigrants in 1661 New Amsterdam via a one-step-ahead-of-the-law sojourn in the Netherlands. Lucas is a talented barber who can’t keep his hands to himself and practices outside the bounds of what his guild permits (hence one step ahead of the law), and Sally an equally talented apothecary with a flair for whipping up laudanum, the morphine of the time. They are devoted to each other, but not for long: a series of slightly soap-opera-y (with a higher explicit violence content) events contrive to put the sibs at permanent loggerheads. Lucas forces Sally to marry the city’s only official legal physician, a mean-spirited dolt whom she loathes and who doesn’t like her much either but is addicted to her super-fine laudanum. Lucas does this for decidedly mixed reasons – the doctor will back off from his persecution of Lucas, he’ll protect Sally from the consequences of her pregnancy (she was raped, but that won’t protect her from The Glorious People – she’s still unmarried, and that is that), and…he’ll give Lucas the money he thinks he needs to marry the woman he loves. Anyway, Sally chooses to focus on the less generous aspects of Lucas’s motivation, and it is all off between them.
And then we skip forward in time, to another generation of the Turner (Lucas’s line…which is really Sally’s line, for another melodramatic twist) and Devrey (Sally’s official descendants) families. This is one of the things that kind of frustrated me about this book; it is basically several linked novellas of varying quality. When you like a set of characters, well, too bad, because they won’t be with you for long! What holds the stories together is the city of New Amsterdam/New York itself (lovingly researched, and the few anachronisms I noticed were trivial and quite defensible in the service of making the story more readable), medical history through some quite thoroughly horrifying and fascinating developments, occasionally a few points of fact from one story to the next, and that the characters who drive the story are Turners and Devreys, who never do seem quite to manage to get along. Not through the end of the eighteenth century, at least, which as far as we go in this installment of the series.
Swerling covers some awfully interesting history. Occasionally she lapses into brief info-dumps, which is probably unavoidable given how much time she covers and the big jumps between generations, but I found that pretty painless. There is, though, a weak spot in a lot of the people running through the various stories: they’re colorful, sure, but a lot of them struck me as a bit flat and one-note. People will do the Worst or Stupidest Thing Possible in a way that doesn’t feel true to an actual human being – sure, some folks suddenly go all derrrrr sometimes, but this is a lot of people doing so a lot of the time. So while the plot moves along, I didn’t always care as much as I would have liked to. I was SOAKED in suspension of disbelief about the deliciously immersive world…but the people, nah, far more frequently than I would have liked. It kept my interest in some of the stories at a remove. Still, a lot happens, and it moves quickly, so there’s always something new to look at.
A few characters, though, were top-notch: the love story between Jennet (a Turner), beautiful and with the uncanny knack for medicine that so many of her family have, and Solomon, a much-older Brazilian Jewish immigrant, ugly and a brothel-keeper (!) who’s been STALKING her since she was, like, twelve (!!!) had not a particularly deep complexity, I suppose, but a fascinating one. I mean, this is not a relationship that looks too promising when you run the numbers, and Swerling doesn’t sugar-coat Solomon’s four-alarm control-freakery and creepiness and opportunism. And yet – they genuinely love each other, and make it work remarkably well, impossibility be damned. When it comes a cropper, you know exactly why – it isn’t a contrivance for dramatic effect, for once, but because we know Solomon so well, we can see perfectly well how this (I’m not going to spoiler this corker) was one hurdle he just couldn’t get over.
I can’t help thinking that all the stories could have had this solidity and resonance, if they’d had enough time to unfold; but what there is remains interesting enough, with the promise that maybe the next books in the series will manage to populate the High Drama with more consistently believable players.
May 8, 2010
OLD HICKORY'S WAR
Andrew Jackson and the Quest for Empire
by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler
336 pages, Louisiana State University Press
Review by Kate Kasserman
Historians, naturally, like any story-tellers, have points of view that inform their interpretation and presentation of the past. Because I read a great deal of American history, which is evidently a particularly tempting field for authors to trot out their prejudices, hopes, fears, and general neuroses, I’ve had to learn to deal with a thousand flavors of spin.
Old Hickory’s War lands in the interesting zone where I cannot say the authors are impartial – they make no bones about offering the routine and facile “Native American = good, white = bad” perspective – and yet they also offer a very readable and engaging account of a neglected patch of history that is brimming with oversized characters (notably, of course, Jackson himself) and entertaining anecdotes, whether shocking, depressing, occasionally noble, or often just…so very telling, as when at the conclusion of the War of 1812, the terms of the peace being “status ante bellum” – all boundaries to return to their pre-war state – the Americans refused to give up the land ceded by the Creeks. The Americans said that the Creek War was a different thing from the War of 1812. The English questioned this; the Americans replied yes, it was certainly a quite distinct conflict, and also the Creek started it, so we were just defending ourselves and it was all their fault anyway. The English muttered unhappily that the Americans always said that about wars they declared – but Britain also wasn’t willing to go to bat for the Creek, and so we got our way.
I mention the Heidlers’ spin because if you are going to be annoyed by that sort of thing, as I generally am (regarding it as simplistic and generally insulting to all parties involved), I recommend that you grit your teeth and brace yourself, because the book is well worth your time nevertheless. For one, it is patent in the text when the authors are moralizing, and their personal opinions about the actions and behaviors of the people involved are clearly separable from their recounting of the facts – which is well-researched and compelling. For two – we’re talking mostly about Andy Jackson and his dealing with the Native Americans here, and, seriously, your only realistic choices on that front are to regard him as amoral or immoral.
We also see Andy screwing the Spanish, as well as two of his very favoritest enemies: the English, and his hierarchical superiors. Mopey Monroe was simply not the man to rein Jackson in (if ever such a person even existed). Jackson stormed through the south as a sort of American id monster; a lot of people wanted that land, and FEROCIOUSLY, but they just weren’t quite sufficiently mean-as-a-snake to do the nasty, false-hearted, disingenuous, bloody work to get it done. And so they turned a blind eye to Jackson’s gleeful predations, no matter how paper-thin his “justifications” to do exactly what he wanted to do: take it all by force, for no damned reason other than it was there. He wanted the Floridas (yes, there used to be two of them – clearly, this matter required our intervention), he wanted the prime land owned by the Creek, and he meant to get it.
And he certainly did, devil take the hindmost (and the consequences).
by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler
336 pages, Louisiana State University Press
Review by Kate Kasserman
Historians, naturally, like any story-tellers, have points of view that inform their interpretation and presentation of the past. Because I read a great deal of American history, which is evidently a particularly tempting field for authors to trot out their prejudices, hopes, fears, and general neuroses, I’ve had to learn to deal with a thousand flavors of spin.
Old Hickory’s War lands in the interesting zone where I cannot say the authors are impartial – they make no bones about offering the routine and facile “Native American = good, white = bad” perspective – and yet they also offer a very readable and engaging account of a neglected patch of history that is brimming with oversized characters (notably, of course, Jackson himself) and entertaining anecdotes, whether shocking, depressing, occasionally noble, or often just…so very telling, as when at the conclusion of the War of 1812, the terms of the peace being “status ante bellum” – all boundaries to return to their pre-war state – the Americans refused to give up the land ceded by the Creeks. The Americans said that the Creek War was a different thing from the War of 1812. The English questioned this; the Americans replied yes, it was certainly a quite distinct conflict, and also the Creek started it, so we were just defending ourselves and it was all their fault anyway. The English muttered unhappily that the Americans always said that about wars they declared – but Britain also wasn’t willing to go to bat for the Creek, and so we got our way.
I mention the Heidlers’ spin because if you are going to be annoyed by that sort of thing, as I generally am (regarding it as simplistic and generally insulting to all parties involved), I recommend that you grit your teeth and brace yourself, because the book is well worth your time nevertheless. For one, it is patent in the text when the authors are moralizing, and their personal opinions about the actions and behaviors of the people involved are clearly separable from their recounting of the facts – which is well-researched and compelling. For two – we’re talking mostly about Andy Jackson and his dealing with the Native Americans here, and, seriously, your only realistic choices on that front are to regard him as amoral or immoral.
We also see Andy screwing the Spanish, as well as two of his very favoritest enemies: the English, and his hierarchical superiors. Mopey Monroe was simply not the man to rein Jackson in (if ever such a person even existed). Jackson stormed through the south as a sort of American id monster; a lot of people wanted that land, and FEROCIOUSLY, but they just weren’t quite sufficiently mean-as-a-snake to do the nasty, false-hearted, disingenuous, bloody work to get it done. And so they turned a blind eye to Jackson’s gleeful predations, no matter how paper-thin his “justifications” to do exactly what he wanted to do: take it all by force, for no damned reason other than it was there. He wanted the Floridas (yes, there used to be two of them – clearly, this matter required our intervention), he wanted the prime land owned by the Creek, and he meant to get it.
And he certainly did, devil take the hindmost (and the consequences).
May 5, 2010
THE DRILLMASTER OF VALLEY FORGE
The Baron De Steuben and the Making of the American Army
by Paul Lockhart
352 pages, Harper Paperbacks
Review by Kate Kasserman
It made me a very happy little dork to see that Lockhart’s biography of von Steuben (or de Steuben, as he was generally known at the time, because the lingua franca was actually franca back then) had been brought out again in a paperback volume earlier this year. Of all the under-recognized figures from the American Revolutionary War (of which there are many, and I will further contend that even the well-recognized figures are often not too well understood), de Steuben is possibly the most inexplicably overlooked. He’s been a pet of mine for a while, and I’m always glad to see him getting some air time.
De Steuben was thoroughly a product of Prussia’s phenomenal war machine. Born into the lowest, grubbiest orders of the Prussian military aristocracy, he spent his entire life, starting in childhood, soaked in army discipline and war and fighting (of which Frederick the Great supplied, heh, plenty). Because he was cheerful and extroverted and a bit of a blowhard, as well as militarily competent, he climbed his way up the political ladder and managed to become a captain on Frederick the Great’s staff. However, this was also probably his undoing in the old world – de Steuben was likable, not savvy, and about as subtle as an elephant playing the cymbals. He promptly got fired, ending his career. Lockhart makes a reasonable case that what knocked de Steuben fatally out of favor was the far more sophisticated maneuvering of a fellow officer who evidently was notorious for getting worrisomely talented peers axed.
Not having a career was more than a minor inconvenience. De Steuben had no money. If he couldn’t work as a soldier, he was all set to starve in the gutter. He thrashed around a bit trying to hire out his services to ANY other European potentate/warlord/whatever, but no dice. His luck just wasn’t on. He had to fall back on his likability, and he became basically a household manager/social secretary for many years; this burned him, but hey, everyone’s got to eat. And maybe he would’ve stuck with that path (loving the family but hating his situation) if his employer hadn’t gone bust. Oh la, de Steuben naturally hadn’t saved any cash (he never did; he was simply incapable of it, apparently), and so he was now well and truly screwed. Until he heard about an army that just might be hiring. And this is when he becomes our friend.
De Steuben arrived in Valley Forge early in 1778, to an army that was just about ready to go home in disgust (this happened to us routinely, and frequently, during the war). Our supply lines were grossly mishandled, so the army was starving where it sat. Our Congress was practicing the fine arts of feeling sorry for itself and sticking its thumbs up its own butt, so neither officers nor enlisted men even had any money to buy food or clothing on their own. It was just – depressing. Once again, the whole big idea was starting to look like a non-starter.
Until de Steuben came, and gave people something to do. He took a quick look at the disorganization of everything, the moping and puttering about, and did a major *facepalm*. This. Was. So. Not. Prussian. It wasn’t even an army, it was a mob! The only way the soldiers could march was SINGLE FILE, because they just couldn’t work out anything more complicated! He almost, almost just fainted like one of those old Star Trek Evil Computers that explodes from a Captain Kirk logic-bomb.
But then he set about fixing it instead. The main problem the army’s spirit had wasn’t spirit to fight – it was spirit to believe it could accomplish anything. So de Steuben trained them, starting with a hand-picked group of soldiers who learned Prussian drill and then passed on their knowledge to the rest of the army. He knew army discipline better than he knew his mother (probably considerably). And more than simply knowing what a functioning army looked like, he knew precisely, Germanically, how to break it down into an analytic, orderly, step-by-step process. He could explain specifically how to get from A to Z, not just wave vaguely at an ideal Z off in the distance.
He promptly encountered some difficulties unique to the situation. One, er, he didn’t really speak English. Two, Americans were not Prussians. We, generally speaking, had “issues” with “people telling us what to do,” which was perhaps to some extent unfortunate in a military setting, but it allowed de Steuben to develop and display his true genius as a teacher and trainer. He was a practical man who meant to succeed. And so he adapted.
At first it made him turn purple with rage when he’d give a perfectly reasonable instruction (translated by his staff), and the soldier in question would ask, “Why?” This wasn’t an aberration, either. Pretty much everyone did it. “Why do you want me to do that?” “SO YOU DON’T DIE ON AN ENEMY BAYONET YOU FLAMING IMBECILE!” wasn’t quite what the soldiers were looking for – or rather, it was half of what they wanted, because de Steuben discovered that two things made American soldiers learn right quick: one, explaining the “why” (it is faster; it keeps you synchronized with the rest of your line, and the whole line can present a formidable front that an individual cannot); two, cursing a blue streak and heaping amusing opprobrium upon their heads. Between his temper fits (which he learned to turn on and off for effect, quite consciously so) and the intelligence of his training, his troops not only learned from him, they learned to love him. (Subsequent generations of shrieking drillmasters calling their charges pustules have not necessarily been as successful in making themselves adored; but they do remain effective.)
The soldiers didn’t care so much that they were starving any more. You can do without food for a while. De Steuben gave them what they really needed: belief that they could be good enough. Even if they were pustules. It is not overstating matters to say that he saved our army from functionally disbanding in 1778. Before de Steuben, they were marking time until they could get the HELL out of Dodge without being hanged for it. After de Steuben – they wanted to stay. And so we held together, barely.
Lockhart’s biography does an excellent job of providing an overview of de Steuben’s life and shines particularly in dealing with some persistent points of confusion (whether or not he was gay, for example – Lockhart painstakingly traces the fine threads of these rumors, most of which end in nothing substantive, and also lays out the fog of circumstantial evidence, concluding properly with “who the hell knows”). Unlike some works based on careful scholarship, it is quite readable, but very much like many works based on careful scholarship, it is not necessarily colorful. I found myself wishing it had been a bit longer and gone into more detail in the Valley Forge months, or perhaps in the entertaining catfight between de Steuben and then-Governor Jefferson (de Steuben and Jeffy both being prime catfighters). But these are minor complaints in a book that offers a well-rounded examination of a life, and a service, that remain well worth our attention.
by Paul Lockhart
352 pages, Harper Paperbacks
Review by Kate Kasserman
It made me a very happy little dork to see that Lockhart’s biography of von Steuben (or de Steuben, as he was generally known at the time, because the lingua franca was actually franca back then) had been brought out again in a paperback volume earlier this year. Of all the under-recognized figures from the American Revolutionary War (of which there are many, and I will further contend that even the well-recognized figures are often not too well understood), de Steuben is possibly the most inexplicably overlooked. He’s been a pet of mine for a while, and I’m always glad to see him getting some air time.
De Steuben was thoroughly a product of Prussia’s phenomenal war machine. Born into the lowest, grubbiest orders of the Prussian military aristocracy, he spent his entire life, starting in childhood, soaked in army discipline and war and fighting (of which Frederick the Great supplied, heh, plenty). Because he was cheerful and extroverted and a bit of a blowhard, as well as militarily competent, he climbed his way up the political ladder and managed to become a captain on Frederick the Great’s staff. However, this was also probably his undoing in the old world – de Steuben was likable, not savvy, and about as subtle as an elephant playing the cymbals. He promptly got fired, ending his career. Lockhart makes a reasonable case that what knocked de Steuben fatally out of favor was the far more sophisticated maneuvering of a fellow officer who evidently was notorious for getting worrisomely talented peers axed.
Not having a career was more than a minor inconvenience. De Steuben had no money. If he couldn’t work as a soldier, he was all set to starve in the gutter. He thrashed around a bit trying to hire out his services to ANY other European potentate/warlord/whatever, but no dice. His luck just wasn’t on. He had to fall back on his likability, and he became basically a household manager/social secretary for many years; this burned him, but hey, everyone’s got to eat. And maybe he would’ve stuck with that path (loving the family but hating his situation) if his employer hadn’t gone bust. Oh la, de Steuben naturally hadn’t saved any cash (he never did; he was simply incapable of it, apparently), and so he was now well and truly screwed. Until he heard about an army that just might be hiring. And this is when he becomes our friend.
De Steuben arrived in Valley Forge early in 1778, to an army that was just about ready to go home in disgust (this happened to us routinely, and frequently, during the war). Our supply lines were grossly mishandled, so the army was starving where it sat. Our Congress was practicing the fine arts of feeling sorry for itself and sticking its thumbs up its own butt, so neither officers nor enlisted men even had any money to buy food or clothing on their own. It was just – depressing. Once again, the whole big idea was starting to look like a non-starter.
Until de Steuben came, and gave people something to do. He took a quick look at the disorganization of everything, the moping and puttering about, and did a major *facepalm*. This. Was. So. Not. Prussian. It wasn’t even an army, it was a mob! The only way the soldiers could march was SINGLE FILE, because they just couldn’t work out anything more complicated! He almost, almost just fainted like one of those old Star Trek Evil Computers that explodes from a Captain Kirk logic-bomb.
But then he set about fixing it instead. The main problem the army’s spirit had wasn’t spirit to fight – it was spirit to believe it could accomplish anything. So de Steuben trained them, starting with a hand-picked group of soldiers who learned Prussian drill and then passed on their knowledge to the rest of the army. He knew army discipline better than he knew his mother (probably considerably). And more than simply knowing what a functioning army looked like, he knew precisely, Germanically, how to break it down into an analytic, orderly, step-by-step process. He could explain specifically how to get from A to Z, not just wave vaguely at an ideal Z off in the distance.
He promptly encountered some difficulties unique to the situation. One, er, he didn’t really speak English. Two, Americans were not Prussians. We, generally speaking, had “issues” with “people telling us what to do,” which was perhaps to some extent unfortunate in a military setting, but it allowed de Steuben to develop and display his true genius as a teacher and trainer. He was a practical man who meant to succeed. And so he adapted.
At first it made him turn purple with rage when he’d give a perfectly reasonable instruction (translated by his staff), and the soldier in question would ask, “Why?” This wasn’t an aberration, either. Pretty much everyone did it. “Why do you want me to do that?” “SO YOU DON’T DIE ON AN ENEMY BAYONET YOU FLAMING IMBECILE!” wasn’t quite what the soldiers were looking for – or rather, it was half of what they wanted, because de Steuben discovered that two things made American soldiers learn right quick: one, explaining the “why” (it is faster; it keeps you synchronized with the rest of your line, and the whole line can present a formidable front that an individual cannot); two, cursing a blue streak and heaping amusing opprobrium upon their heads. Between his temper fits (which he learned to turn on and off for effect, quite consciously so) and the intelligence of his training, his troops not only learned from him, they learned to love him. (Subsequent generations of shrieking drillmasters calling their charges pustules have not necessarily been as successful in making themselves adored; but they do remain effective.)
The soldiers didn’t care so much that they were starving any more. You can do without food for a while. De Steuben gave them what they really needed: belief that they could be good enough. Even if they were pustules. It is not overstating matters to say that he saved our army from functionally disbanding in 1778. Before de Steuben, they were marking time until they could get the HELL out of Dodge without being hanged for it. After de Steuben – they wanted to stay. And so we held together, barely.
Lockhart’s biography does an excellent job of providing an overview of de Steuben’s life and shines particularly in dealing with some persistent points of confusion (whether or not he was gay, for example – Lockhart painstakingly traces the fine threads of these rumors, most of which end in nothing substantive, and also lays out the fog of circumstantial evidence, concluding properly with “who the hell knows”). Unlike some works based on careful scholarship, it is quite readable, but very much like many works based on careful scholarship, it is not necessarily colorful. I found myself wishing it had been a bit longer and gone into more detail in the Valley Forge months, or perhaps in the entertaining catfight between de Steuben and then-Governor Jefferson (de Steuben and Jeffy both being prime catfighters). But these are minor complaints in a book that offers a well-rounded examination of a life, and a service, that remain well worth our attention.
April 17, 2010
FLASHMAN IN THE GREAT GAME
by George MacDonald Fraser
336 pages, Plume
Review by Kate Kasserman
For those unfamiliar with Fraser’s Flashman series, these books (a dozen or so, I think) document the fictional adventures of Harry Flashman as time and again luck plops him in the thick of pretty much every disastrous military engagement available to a Victorian Englishman (of which there are rather a lot) and then pulls him out not only alive but covered in glory. The glory, by the way, is fully unearned; Flashman is about as dire a human specimen as can be imagined: cowardly and abusive, disloyal and opportunistic, predatory of women, a fawning “toady” (his word) who gets ahead by knowing how to lick the right boots in the right way. Flashy is utterly unapologetic – well, in his memoirs anyway, where it won’t cost him any laurels. And he is very funny…as long as you can see the funny in the most appalling, cold-blooded, selfish high-handedness that a nineteenth-century military Englishman caricature can produce, which is considerable.
I will sum Flashy up with a brief anecdote from the first book in the series (not this one). Being annoyed by the pretensions of a fellow officer, Flashy seduced the man’s mistress, and, when challenged to a duel (Flashman is good at foreign languages, horseback riding, and wheedling women into bed, and that’s about it – marksmanship, no) by the sharpshooting fellow he offended, Flashy bribes one of his own lickspittles to load the sharpshooter’s pistols WITHOUT BULLETS (Flashy gets bullets, of course). Then afterwards he doesn’t pay the lickspittle his promised fee. (Flashman’s shot goes wild and is taken for a particularly stylish form of deloping, to the amazement and approbation of all.) So – you get the picture.
A great narrative advantage of Flashy’s total focus on his own skin and reputation is that he is fairly even-handed in dishing out contempt – which is probably a pretty good way to get a solid baseline sense of most conflicts, along with contempt in general being amusing to read.
Flashman in the Great Game is somewhere in the middle of the series; when I bought it, I thought it was book #2, which it is not. I suppose I ran into some technical spoilers about events in the intermediate books, but I remain blithely unconcerned – it’s hard for events to be spoilered when the ultimate result is, always, a fait accompli anyway! The particular horrors detailed here are from the 1857 rebellion in India. Flashy, much against his inclination, is sent on a special mission to investigate Disconcerting Signs in India. Of course he has no interest in Disconcerting Signs, but it doesn’t take long for them to turn into bloody and dreadful events. Really dreadful.
So dreadful, in fact, that a strange thing happens in this book. I mean, Fraser consistently shows a melancholic awareness of the horror of things, of humanity in general and war in specific, in his writing. But in Flashman in the Great Game, it clearly gets to him, and consequently to Flashman, who shows some uncharacteristic sympathy and even a few aberrant moments of altruism towards both Indians and English. (For a measure of how grim the atrocities were, take this: at the time, an enraged Mr. Charles “I am sensitive and all about big-eyed orphans” Dickens advocated pretty much turning India into a lifeless desert, salting its earth for a thousand years with the blood of its people; this gives you a fair inkling, I think, of the level of sickening savagery inflicted by both sides. Massacres of children. Executions via tying people to the front of cannons and then blasting through their bodies. It goes on; but I will not.)
I remain of two minds whether this slip of the dispassionate mask makes this one of the better Flashman books or a particularly flawed one. It’s a question I don’t intend to resolve. Some questions are better left open, after all; resolution can be a nasty business.
336 pages, Plume
Review by Kate Kasserman
For those unfamiliar with Fraser’s Flashman series, these books (a dozen or so, I think) document the fictional adventures of Harry Flashman as time and again luck plops him in the thick of pretty much every disastrous military engagement available to a Victorian Englishman (of which there are rather a lot) and then pulls him out not only alive but covered in glory. The glory, by the way, is fully unearned; Flashman is about as dire a human specimen as can be imagined: cowardly and abusive, disloyal and opportunistic, predatory of women, a fawning “toady” (his word) who gets ahead by knowing how to lick the right boots in the right way. Flashy is utterly unapologetic – well, in his memoirs anyway, where it won’t cost him any laurels. And he is very funny…as long as you can see the funny in the most appalling, cold-blooded, selfish high-handedness that a nineteenth-century military Englishman caricature can produce, which is considerable.
I will sum Flashy up with a brief anecdote from the first book in the series (not this one). Being annoyed by the pretensions of a fellow officer, Flashy seduced the man’s mistress, and, when challenged to a duel (Flashman is good at foreign languages, horseback riding, and wheedling women into bed, and that’s about it – marksmanship, no) by the sharpshooting fellow he offended, Flashy bribes one of his own lickspittles to load the sharpshooter’s pistols WITHOUT BULLETS (Flashy gets bullets, of course). Then afterwards he doesn’t pay the lickspittle his promised fee. (Flashman’s shot goes wild and is taken for a particularly stylish form of deloping, to the amazement and approbation of all.) So – you get the picture.
A great narrative advantage of Flashy’s total focus on his own skin and reputation is that he is fairly even-handed in dishing out contempt – which is probably a pretty good way to get a solid baseline sense of most conflicts, along with contempt in general being amusing to read.
Flashman in the Great Game is somewhere in the middle of the series; when I bought it, I thought it was book #2, which it is not. I suppose I ran into some technical spoilers about events in the intermediate books, but I remain blithely unconcerned – it’s hard for events to be spoilered when the ultimate result is, always, a fait accompli anyway! The particular horrors detailed here are from the 1857 rebellion in India. Flashy, much against his inclination, is sent on a special mission to investigate Disconcerting Signs in India. Of course he has no interest in Disconcerting Signs, but it doesn’t take long for them to turn into bloody and dreadful events. Really dreadful.
So dreadful, in fact, that a strange thing happens in this book. I mean, Fraser consistently shows a melancholic awareness of the horror of things, of humanity in general and war in specific, in his writing. But in Flashman in the Great Game, it clearly gets to him, and consequently to Flashman, who shows some uncharacteristic sympathy and even a few aberrant moments of altruism towards both Indians and English. (For a measure of how grim the atrocities were, take this: at the time, an enraged Mr. Charles “I am sensitive and all about big-eyed orphans” Dickens advocated pretty much turning India into a lifeless desert, salting its earth for a thousand years with the blood of its people; this gives you a fair inkling, I think, of the level of sickening savagery inflicted by both sides. Massacres of children. Executions via tying people to the front of cannons and then blasting through their bodies. It goes on; but I will not.)
I remain of two minds whether this slip of the dispassionate mask makes this one of the better Flashman books or a particularly flawed one. It’s a question I don’t intend to resolve. Some questions are better left open, after all; resolution can be a nasty business.
April 6, 2010
THE OCTOGENARIAN SKI-JUMPER
by Martin McGovern
184 pages, Lulu.com
Review from free advance copy by Kate Kasserman
There is an argument against, quite simply, everything. There is always a flaw, and there is always a perfectly good reason why something can’t be done (generally several). Interestingly, we seem to be living in an Age where “judgment” has been all-too-often swallowed alive by “nitpick,” and any single negative, be it ever so infinitesimal, is shown in its true colors as the Zoroastrian particle of pure evil. And DUDE, you cannot fight the Zoroastrian particle of pure evil, seriously, so Surrender Dorothy! And do, like, nothing ever. Including breathe. Because you might accidentally inhale an errant botulism spore or something. They’re out there!
Well, signs of the times aside, people do criticize themselves a lot (I know it doesn’t seem that way sometimes, to hear the humans talk, but they really do). We go from “I’m too inexperienced to do anything” to a golden six-week period at approximately age 23 straight into “oh, I’m past it now.” Hm, is this accurate? Because now I can check!
The Octogenarian Ski-Jumper lists notable human achievements – no, not all of them (that would be a rather unwieldy thing, even if one limited oneself to near-certainties) – broken down by the age of the achiever. If you are 51, for example, you can see that this is a banner year for being inaugurated as a US President (should your interests incline that way), and it is also the age when WC Fields (this is more my speed) burst into pictures. (Take THAT, 23-year-old Carson McCullers with your The Heart is a Lonely Hunter! Although that too, admittedly, is cool.)
Each age is broken down into subcategories (sports, literature, business, science – whatever is apropos), and each accomplishment is described with a light-hearted, sometimes drily funny explanation or context. It is a book that readers will probably dip into (“Oo, Aunt Clarabelle is here – let’s do 68!”) rather than read straight through – but having read it straight through myself, I may as well point out that it has an almost irresistibly cheering effect. Go people! Do all your – stuff, whatever it may be!
I am not just riding my personal hobby-horse in pointing out that “reasons for” should be given at least equal weight as “reasons against” – or maybe I am, but at any rate it is consistent with the stated intention of the book. Well, the stated intention, which is, interestingly, the exact same as the slyly implied one. Here is the stated part. In the introduction, McGovern cites his inspiration: his wife was having a dismal 44th birthday, capped off by her sighing glumly that “No-one ever achieved anything when they were forty-four.” As a technical point, he considered this unlikely; as a marital point, he found it an irresistible challenge. (And the 44 chapter, by the way, is a doozy – holy Moses, Newton’s Principia!)
And then the unstated part. At the conclusion, we have reached the very wrinkly age of 105, with a Mr. Percy Arrowsmith, who celebrated his 80th anniversary with his 100-year-old wife Florence. (This is admittedly a cumulative achievement that you can’t just spontaneously pull off at age 105.) From the book:
When asked about the secret of a good marriage, 100-year-old Florence said that it was important to make up if you’ve had a quarrel, and never go to bed on an argument. Percy, aged 105, said it was simpler than that. When pressed, he said, “In two words – ‘Yes, dear.’”
Fine advice, but taken in combination with the introduction, I believe the book’s conclusion is “Yes, dear” followed by an unspoken “but still.” Heh. And that’s even finer advice.
184 pages, Lulu.com
Review from free advance copy by Kate Kasserman
There is an argument against, quite simply, everything. There is always a flaw, and there is always a perfectly good reason why something can’t be done (generally several). Interestingly, we seem to be living in an Age where “judgment” has been all-too-often swallowed alive by “nitpick,” and any single negative, be it ever so infinitesimal, is shown in its true colors as the Zoroastrian particle of pure evil. And DUDE, you cannot fight the Zoroastrian particle of pure evil, seriously, so Surrender Dorothy! And do, like, nothing ever. Including breathe. Because you might accidentally inhale an errant botulism spore or something. They’re out there!
Well, signs of the times aside, people do criticize themselves a lot (I know it doesn’t seem that way sometimes, to hear the humans talk, but they really do). We go from “I’m too inexperienced to do anything” to a golden six-week period at approximately age 23 straight into “oh, I’m past it now.” Hm, is this accurate? Because now I can check!
The Octogenarian Ski-Jumper lists notable human achievements – no, not all of them (that would be a rather unwieldy thing, even if one limited oneself to near-certainties) – broken down by the age of the achiever. If you are 51, for example, you can see that this is a banner year for being inaugurated as a US President (should your interests incline that way), and it is also the age when WC Fields (this is more my speed) burst into pictures. (Take THAT, 23-year-old Carson McCullers with your The Heart is a Lonely Hunter! Although that too, admittedly, is cool.)
Each age is broken down into subcategories (sports, literature, business, science – whatever is apropos), and each accomplishment is described with a light-hearted, sometimes drily funny explanation or context. It is a book that readers will probably dip into (“Oo, Aunt Clarabelle is here – let’s do 68!”) rather than read straight through – but having read it straight through myself, I may as well point out that it has an almost irresistibly cheering effect. Go people! Do all your – stuff, whatever it may be!
I am not just riding my personal hobby-horse in pointing out that “reasons for” should be given at least equal weight as “reasons against” – or maybe I am, but at any rate it is consistent with the stated intention of the book. Well, the stated intention, which is, interestingly, the exact same as the slyly implied one. Here is the stated part. In the introduction, McGovern cites his inspiration: his wife was having a dismal 44th birthday, capped off by her sighing glumly that “No-one ever achieved anything when they were forty-four.” As a technical point, he considered this unlikely; as a marital point, he found it an irresistible challenge. (And the 44 chapter, by the way, is a doozy – holy Moses, Newton’s Principia!)
And then the unstated part. At the conclusion, we have reached the very wrinkly age of 105, with a Mr. Percy Arrowsmith, who celebrated his 80th anniversary with his 100-year-old wife Florence. (This is admittedly a cumulative achievement that you can’t just spontaneously pull off at age 105.) From the book:
When asked about the secret of a good marriage, 100-year-old Florence said that it was important to make up if you’ve had a quarrel, and never go to bed on an argument. Percy, aged 105, said it was simpler than that. When pressed, he said, “In two words – ‘Yes, dear.’”
Fine advice, but taken in combination with the introduction, I believe the book’s conclusion is “Yes, dear” followed by an unspoken “but still.” Heh. And that’s even finer advice.
February 13, 2010
THE DARKNESS
by Bill Kirton
320 pages. YouWriteOn.
Review by Kate Kasserman
We all know the difference between right and wrong (begging the brief indulgence of any psychopaths who might be reading), and we all know that there is a large, gray demilitarized zone between the two, a demilitarized zone that might arguably contain the vast bulk of human experience and endeavor. People are a mixed bag, after all, even the nicest ones. No one is devoid of some desire for power, however well-intentioned or modest (and violence is ultimately about power).
Part of the enduring appeal of crime and thriller fiction is that it gives us a no-fault reason, at least vicariously, to slip off the leash. An excuse, an excuse! A golden ticket into the DMZ! (Best. Wonka Bar. EVER.) Someone else started it! There’s a murder – a crime – a something or other that obliges us to beat our plowshares into swords and march into the muck, but only because we must defend the right and the innocent and the true.
The usual format of a crime/thriller drenches us in reasons why the protagonist is stuck holding the bag for this delicious, poisonous social correction. The authorities don’t care – or the hero has a damning secret – or the victim does – and so on, etc. The Darkness is a chilling exception to that rule. Two original crimes (a recent hit-and-run that kills a woman and her young daughters, and a years-old rape) propel the main events of the story, and Scottish (well, he’s English, but he works in Scotland) DCI Jack Carston would’ve given his right arm to solve both of them. So would his bosses. (They’d’ve given Carston’s right arm, anyway – at any rate, they certainly aren’t in the way.)
Actually, Carston did solve them. He knows very well who’s guilty of each. It’s just not enough, and not the proper kind of, evidence to hold up in a court of law. Whether we wear badges or not, we can’t go gadding about with Rule of Mob and cutting off the tongues and ears of people we “just know” are guilty. In principle, this is clear enough, and laudable: better a guilty man go free than an innocent man be hanged. Just typing it makes me feel clean, even without brushing my teeth.
Except – what would it feel like to be one of the wounded abandoned in the aftermath of one of these unpunished crimes? A small wobble in the broader balance of society, a cost we consider cheap in terms of the value it provides, can be a violent convulsion on the scale of individual human souls.
It can destroy them.
This is the infinitely queasy territory that The Darkness mines. It isn’t about the hit-and-run or the rape. These original crimes are like pinprick holes in a pair of stockings. The holes weren’t darned. The stockings are going to run. And the book follows the unraveling with a careful psychological precision that hits the (very) tricky balance between dispassionate honesty about and sympathy for basically good people squashed by cruel circumstances.
Three characters show us three ways to unravel. Andrew Davidson was bereaved twice by the hit-and-run. The first victims were his sister-in-law and nieces; the next victim was his brother, who collapsed beneath the loss of his wife and daughters and committed suicide. I am not spoiling anything in the plot by revealing that Davidson goes unhinged by deciding to take matters into his own hands and punish not just the hit-and-run driver but several other perps who are walking around free as the wind. He goes cowboy on us, and he provides the crimes that start the story running. Several crimes in fact, including a murder plot (Davidson prefers to – well, torture, basically, chaining his victims up in his lightless basement – but whom he cannot get his hands upon to torture he decides he must simply eliminate) of remarkable deviousness. His vigilante work mires him increasingly as his “civilian” life is taking a turn for the better with a new love, just to salt the wound.
Rhona Kirk is the rape victim, and her response to being pistol-whipped by unpunished crime was: roll with it. She disengaged emotionally and became a prostitute. She’s good at her work; being numb lets her be cold, but the core of decency remains – she doesn’t try to wreck lives, she just tries to do a good job within the strictly defined boundaries of her profession. Since she cultivates regulars as a business practice, she hears plenty of “I love you, come away with me”s, which she dismisses – up until the point where it is noticed that someone who mistreated her has gone missing (while a single missing person here or there might be shrugged off, Davidson’s predations are broad enough to have established a bit of concern about AWOL SOBs), and she discovers for the first time in years that she really does need, and want, a friend.
Jack Carston deals with the messiness of the world because he has to. What manages to punch through his professional boundaries is Davidson’s string of threats and kidnappings – because Carston really, REALLY has a hard time putting his heart into it when part of him is singing HALLELUJAH at the perfectly delightful choice of victims. I was with Carston here. It’s easier for me to admit, because I can take refuge in everything being a story. But when the pedophile, for example, was on the docket to be snatched, I…wanted Davidson to get away with it. (For all that the book does not actually tell us for certain whether ALL the presumed guilty are in fact guilty – so I got to experience the creepy ambiguousness of my own reaction.)
It’s Carston’s job to protect the legally innocent, and Davidson’s prey fall into this category, no matter what they may or may not have done. That’s Carston’s burden. Can he do his job impartially when, as a personal matter, he’d just as soon Davidson got away with it?
Obviously, the reader knows what Davidson is up to – we spent a lot of time in Davidson’s head. We don’t know how the Kirk-related disappearance(s) factor in, but all is revealed (that would be a spoiler, so I’m not telling). On the surface, a lot of the tension in the book is watching Davidson (will he or won’t he?) try to bag each of his victims. But the real pressure is in watching each of these three characters (and several secondary ones) struggle with which side of the line they’re going to come down on. Davidson and Kirk have the chance for something better. Carston has the chance for something worse.
By the book’s end, we get our answers. As in life, it was a mix – some of it was what I hoped for, and some of it was not. But all of it, good and bad alike, rang true. Though it was a bit like standing right NEXT to the ringing bell, because it rattled my innards. But in a crime story, justice must be served: and indeed it is. How much of it is right or fair, you’re left to decide.
320 pages. YouWriteOn.
Review by Kate Kasserman
We all know the difference between right and wrong (begging the brief indulgence of any psychopaths who might be reading), and we all know that there is a large, gray demilitarized zone between the two, a demilitarized zone that might arguably contain the vast bulk of human experience and endeavor. People are a mixed bag, after all, even the nicest ones. No one is devoid of some desire for power, however well-intentioned or modest (and violence is ultimately about power).
Part of the enduring appeal of crime and thriller fiction is that it gives us a no-fault reason, at least vicariously, to slip off the leash. An excuse, an excuse! A golden ticket into the DMZ! (Best. Wonka Bar. EVER.) Someone else started it! There’s a murder – a crime – a something or other that obliges us to beat our plowshares into swords and march into the muck, but only because we must defend the right and the innocent and the true.
The usual format of a crime/thriller drenches us in reasons why the protagonist is stuck holding the bag for this delicious, poisonous social correction. The authorities don’t care – or the hero has a damning secret – or the victim does – and so on, etc. The Darkness is a chilling exception to that rule. Two original crimes (a recent hit-and-run that kills a woman and her young daughters, and a years-old rape) propel the main events of the story, and Scottish (well, he’s English, but he works in Scotland) DCI Jack Carston would’ve given his right arm to solve both of them. So would his bosses. (They’d’ve given Carston’s right arm, anyway – at any rate, they certainly aren’t in the way.)
Actually, Carston did solve them. He knows very well who’s guilty of each. It’s just not enough, and not the proper kind of, evidence to hold up in a court of law. Whether we wear badges or not, we can’t go gadding about with Rule of Mob and cutting off the tongues and ears of people we “just know” are guilty. In principle, this is clear enough, and laudable: better a guilty man go free than an innocent man be hanged. Just typing it makes me feel clean, even without brushing my teeth.
Except – what would it feel like to be one of the wounded abandoned in the aftermath of one of these unpunished crimes? A small wobble in the broader balance of society, a cost we consider cheap in terms of the value it provides, can be a violent convulsion on the scale of individual human souls.
It can destroy them.
This is the infinitely queasy territory that The Darkness mines. It isn’t about the hit-and-run or the rape. These original crimes are like pinprick holes in a pair of stockings. The holes weren’t darned. The stockings are going to run. And the book follows the unraveling with a careful psychological precision that hits the (very) tricky balance between dispassionate honesty about and sympathy for basically good people squashed by cruel circumstances.
Three characters show us three ways to unravel. Andrew Davidson was bereaved twice by the hit-and-run. The first victims were his sister-in-law and nieces; the next victim was his brother, who collapsed beneath the loss of his wife and daughters and committed suicide. I am not spoiling anything in the plot by revealing that Davidson goes unhinged by deciding to take matters into his own hands and punish not just the hit-and-run driver but several other perps who are walking around free as the wind. He goes cowboy on us, and he provides the crimes that start the story running. Several crimes in fact, including a murder plot (Davidson prefers to – well, torture, basically, chaining his victims up in his lightless basement – but whom he cannot get his hands upon to torture he decides he must simply eliminate) of remarkable deviousness. His vigilante work mires him increasingly as his “civilian” life is taking a turn for the better with a new love, just to salt the wound.
Rhona Kirk is the rape victim, and her response to being pistol-whipped by unpunished crime was: roll with it. She disengaged emotionally and became a prostitute. She’s good at her work; being numb lets her be cold, but the core of decency remains – she doesn’t try to wreck lives, she just tries to do a good job within the strictly defined boundaries of her profession. Since she cultivates regulars as a business practice, she hears plenty of “I love you, come away with me”s, which she dismisses – up until the point where it is noticed that someone who mistreated her has gone missing (while a single missing person here or there might be shrugged off, Davidson’s predations are broad enough to have established a bit of concern about AWOL SOBs), and she discovers for the first time in years that she really does need, and want, a friend.
Jack Carston deals with the messiness of the world because he has to. What manages to punch through his professional boundaries is Davidson’s string of threats and kidnappings – because Carston really, REALLY has a hard time putting his heart into it when part of him is singing HALLELUJAH at the perfectly delightful choice of victims. I was with Carston here. It’s easier for me to admit, because I can take refuge in everything being a story. But when the pedophile, for example, was on the docket to be snatched, I…wanted Davidson to get away with it. (For all that the book does not actually tell us for certain whether ALL the presumed guilty are in fact guilty – so I got to experience the creepy ambiguousness of my own reaction.)
It’s Carston’s job to protect the legally innocent, and Davidson’s prey fall into this category, no matter what they may or may not have done. That’s Carston’s burden. Can he do his job impartially when, as a personal matter, he’d just as soon Davidson got away with it?
Obviously, the reader knows what Davidson is up to – we spent a lot of time in Davidson’s head. We don’t know how the Kirk-related disappearance(s) factor in, but all is revealed (that would be a spoiler, so I’m not telling). On the surface, a lot of the tension in the book is watching Davidson (will he or won’t he?) try to bag each of his victims. But the real pressure is in watching each of these three characters (and several secondary ones) struggle with which side of the line they’re going to come down on. Davidson and Kirk have the chance for something better. Carston has the chance for something worse.
By the book’s end, we get our answers. As in life, it was a mix – some of it was what I hoped for, and some of it was not. But all of it, good and bad alike, rang true. Though it was a bit like standing right NEXT to the ringing bell, because it rattled my innards. But in a crime story, justice must be served: and indeed it is. How much of it is right or fair, you’re left to decide.
February 8, 2010
RED POPPIES
Tales of Envy and Revenge
by S. P. Miskowski
124 pages. YouWriteOn.
Review by Kate Kasserman
At least in America, whereof I can speak – and the five stories that comprise Red Poppies are all set in the American northwest – we enjoy a marrow-deep delusion (and I’m knocking it, but I still believe it – that’s how insidious it is) that somewhere, somehow everyone has a special something in them that has the potential to vault them to the top of the heap. They’re sensitive, they’re smart, they’re venturesome, they have the patience to collect navel lint for years – SOMETHING that gives them an edge, an edge that can be turned to some sort of glory and accomplishment, however small (cf. navel lint).
It is not, shall we say, a wholly accurate reflection of reality. Even Horatio Alger, the Prophet of Upward Mobility in the first great age of American robber barons, put LUCK first in his holy trinity: luck, pluck, and decency. (And the “decency” bit was pure moralizing on his part, and a dramatic contrivance to justify the luck.)
In Red Poppies, we have a more logical set of requirements: luck, talent, and passion. Which turns, sometimes, into means, motive, and opportunity.
It is not only possible but in fact very much with the odds that any given individual will have only one or a few pieces of the puzzle, not the whole shebang. The box promises a picture of “bulldog sleeping with puffball kittens,” or “Notre Dame on a sunny day” but all we can build out of what we’ve got is the neutral-colored carpet or some inoffensive blue sky with an errant pigeon. Red Poppies takes a good, hard look at the VERY darkly comic (people do die) results of these almost-rans. They’re not quite there. And at whatever level, all of them know it. But there’s sweet FA any of them can do about it – and that’s when the fun begins.
Miskowski shows a sniper’s aim in characterization and dialogue, zeroing in on the most (heh, often hilariously) damning statements and internal observations by the characters in all their perverted, self-justifying, hypocritical, disastrous splendor. Art and theater wannabes figure prominently in several stories, and I KNOW these people (I’m not naming names – I want to stay alive, here!) – not the cheerful dilettantes and hobbyists, but the aggrieved peripherals and failures who either can’t or won’t put it together to do something themselves and then set themselves up as attitudinous parasites. Like someone who thinks fly-fishing itself is boring but wants not only to walk around in waders but have people respect and admire the waders. Even in coffee shops and white-tie affairs. (Not rivers, ever.)
The title story of the book, and my favorite of the five, gives us Hazel, an apparently stolid cleaning lady content to dribble out her years in numb, friendless menial work – until she runs into someone special, who in turn makes her feel special too. Paula is a high-strung trophy wife (she also has a case of flaming borderline personality disorder, I might mention by the bye), and she takes Hazel under her wing as a “muse” (to wit, a near-mute compliant subordinate obedient to Paula’s every whim). Hazel seems to have made her peace with a failed life, but Paula, quite vocally, has not. Paula latches onto one shrill, impotent scheme after another in order to – what? Support her own sense of specialness, and nothing but, and it is both savagely funny and very, very sad to watch her be quite so histrionic and self-defeating. Take Paula on learning from Hazel that the exercise class she wanted to attend is not an option that week:
“No!” she shouted. “Did you explain how desperately I need movement right now? And did you tell them what Dr. Lammerworth said, that I could follow along at my own pace, and if I got tired I should lie down on the floor near the instructor where no one can step on my toe by accident? Did you tell them if I don’t get a workout soon I am going to go out of my mind?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And they said that the class is cancelled. They said: ‘Tell her that the class is definitely cancelled.’”
“How can I bear this trial another minute?” she screamed. “I am so out of shape, I’m drowning in my own fat!”
Now this wasn’t true. Because no matter how many brownies or White Russians or slices of vanilla cheesecake I served Paula, she stayed amazingly skinny. I thought she must have a high metabolism, some people do. But she said it was because of her eating disorder and I would never understand since I was normal. Actually, she said:
“You’re so lucky to be an ordinary person.”
I should note in Paula’s defense that her toe was indeed slightly injured.
Hazel is a careful observer, and her flat affect provides a marvelous setting for the full unimpeded glitter of Paula’s crazy. Well, as Paula knew in the first place – that’s why she picked Hazel. Madam Dull Cleaning Lady, we slowly learn, is not really as dumb as a bag of dirt; we see her making practical, largely nonjudgmental assessments of the various situations thrown at her and unfreezing a bit as the constant, if idiotic and increasingly dangerous, excitement of Paula-world seeps into Hazel’s sense of herself.
I am too familiar with the all-but-inevitable trajectory of borderlines to have had too much hope for Paula, although I will admit to some. She does, after all, have some redeeming features – an aesthetic sense (if an erratic one) and certainly a surfeit of, heh, emotionality. And the chance remains that by doing some good for Hazel, Paula will, despite herself, actually contribute to the world, a happy result all around!
But then Hazel’s status as “chief locus of Paula’s fractured attention” is supplanted by a newcomer, Paula’s husband’s teenaged son by his first marriage (Mr. Livingston seems to have a taste for wacky women, and his ex-wife has managed to get herself incarcerated). Then the question becomes whether Hazel has really had her own soul opened by Paula’s emotionality and aesthetics, or whether she’s simply become addicted to Paula’s sense of entitlement.
It’s a question that is repeated, from various angles, in various forms throughout the other four stories in the collection. Both the wicked, sometimes painful humor of the entitled shrilly demanding their unearned due, and the profound dangerousness of messing with that no matter how stupid it is, hit the target. These stories have a sting and leave a mark. Speaking as someone with her own histrionic and inflationary tendencies, I have found myself on several occasions after reading Red Poppies starting to say something and then hauling myself up short with an internal dialogue that runs something like this: “Ohshitohshitshutup.”
Miskowski makes it funny – which lets her get away with saying a lot.
by S. P. Miskowski
124 pages. YouWriteOn.
Review by Kate Kasserman
At least in America, whereof I can speak – and the five stories that comprise Red Poppies are all set in the American northwest – we enjoy a marrow-deep delusion (and I’m knocking it, but I still believe it – that’s how insidious it is) that somewhere, somehow everyone has a special something in them that has the potential to vault them to the top of the heap. They’re sensitive, they’re smart, they’re venturesome, they have the patience to collect navel lint for years – SOMETHING that gives them an edge, an edge that can be turned to some sort of glory and accomplishment, however small (cf. navel lint).
It is not, shall we say, a wholly accurate reflection of reality. Even Horatio Alger, the Prophet of Upward Mobility in the first great age of American robber barons, put LUCK first in his holy trinity: luck, pluck, and decency. (And the “decency” bit was pure moralizing on his part, and a dramatic contrivance to justify the luck.)
In Red Poppies, we have a more logical set of requirements: luck, talent, and passion. Which turns, sometimes, into means, motive, and opportunity.
It is not only possible but in fact very much with the odds that any given individual will have only one or a few pieces of the puzzle, not the whole shebang. The box promises a picture of “bulldog sleeping with puffball kittens,” or “Notre Dame on a sunny day” but all we can build out of what we’ve got is the neutral-colored carpet or some inoffensive blue sky with an errant pigeon. Red Poppies takes a good, hard look at the VERY darkly comic (people do die) results of these almost-rans. They’re not quite there. And at whatever level, all of them know it. But there’s sweet FA any of them can do about it – and that’s when the fun begins.
Miskowski shows a sniper’s aim in characterization and dialogue, zeroing in on the most (heh, often hilariously) damning statements and internal observations by the characters in all their perverted, self-justifying, hypocritical, disastrous splendor. Art and theater wannabes figure prominently in several stories, and I KNOW these people (I’m not naming names – I want to stay alive, here!) – not the cheerful dilettantes and hobbyists, but the aggrieved peripherals and failures who either can’t or won’t put it together to do something themselves and then set themselves up as attitudinous parasites. Like someone who thinks fly-fishing itself is boring but wants not only to walk around in waders but have people respect and admire the waders. Even in coffee shops and white-tie affairs. (Not rivers, ever.)
The title story of the book, and my favorite of the five, gives us Hazel, an apparently stolid cleaning lady content to dribble out her years in numb, friendless menial work – until she runs into someone special, who in turn makes her feel special too. Paula is a high-strung trophy wife (she also has a case of flaming borderline personality disorder, I might mention by the bye), and she takes Hazel under her wing as a “muse” (to wit, a near-mute compliant subordinate obedient to Paula’s every whim). Hazel seems to have made her peace with a failed life, but Paula, quite vocally, has not. Paula latches onto one shrill, impotent scheme after another in order to – what? Support her own sense of specialness, and nothing but, and it is both savagely funny and very, very sad to watch her be quite so histrionic and self-defeating. Take Paula on learning from Hazel that the exercise class she wanted to attend is not an option that week:
“No!” she shouted. “Did you explain how desperately I need movement right now? And did you tell them what Dr. Lammerworth said, that I could follow along at my own pace, and if I got tired I should lie down on the floor near the instructor where no one can step on my toe by accident? Did you tell them if I don’t get a workout soon I am going to go out of my mind?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And they said that the class is cancelled. They said: ‘Tell her that the class is definitely cancelled.’”
“How can I bear this trial another minute?” she screamed. “I am so out of shape, I’m drowning in my own fat!”
Now this wasn’t true. Because no matter how many brownies or White Russians or slices of vanilla cheesecake I served Paula, she stayed amazingly skinny. I thought she must have a high metabolism, some people do. But she said it was because of her eating disorder and I would never understand since I was normal. Actually, she said:
“You’re so lucky to be an ordinary person.”
I should note in Paula’s defense that her toe was indeed slightly injured.
Hazel is a careful observer, and her flat affect provides a marvelous setting for the full unimpeded glitter of Paula’s crazy. Well, as Paula knew in the first place – that’s why she picked Hazel. Madam Dull Cleaning Lady, we slowly learn, is not really as dumb as a bag of dirt; we see her making practical, largely nonjudgmental assessments of the various situations thrown at her and unfreezing a bit as the constant, if idiotic and increasingly dangerous, excitement of Paula-world seeps into Hazel’s sense of herself.
I am too familiar with the all-but-inevitable trajectory of borderlines to have had too much hope for Paula, although I will admit to some. She does, after all, have some redeeming features – an aesthetic sense (if an erratic one) and certainly a surfeit of, heh, emotionality. And the chance remains that by doing some good for Hazel, Paula will, despite herself, actually contribute to the world, a happy result all around!
But then Hazel’s status as “chief locus of Paula’s fractured attention” is supplanted by a newcomer, Paula’s husband’s teenaged son by his first marriage (Mr. Livingston seems to have a taste for wacky women, and his ex-wife has managed to get herself incarcerated). Then the question becomes whether Hazel has really had her own soul opened by Paula’s emotionality and aesthetics, or whether she’s simply become addicted to Paula’s sense of entitlement.
It’s a question that is repeated, from various angles, in various forms throughout the other four stories in the collection. Both the wicked, sometimes painful humor of the entitled shrilly demanding their unearned due, and the profound dangerousness of messing with that no matter how stupid it is, hit the target. These stories have a sting and leave a mark. Speaking as someone with her own histrionic and inflationary tendencies, I have found myself on several occasions after reading Red Poppies starting to say something and then hauling myself up short with an internal dialogue that runs something like this: “Ohshitohshitshutup.”
Miskowski makes it funny – which lets her get away with saying a lot.
February 2, 2010
THE CAPTIVE
The True Story of the Captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Among the Indians and God’s Faithfulness to her in her Time of Trial
By Mary Rowlandson
64 pages, CreateSpace
Review by Kate Kasserman
The Captive is a memoir of Mary Rowlandson’s 1675 capture and enslavement by the Wampanoag alliance, and it made a big splash back in the seventeenth century upon its debut. Not only was it the first full-length (by the standards of the time, to wit, a pamphlet) literary work by an American woman, but it had NEWS FROM THE OTHER SIDE: the Native Americans. It would be fair to say that early American colonists were more than moderately concerned about their neighbors.
That window into the now-destroyed Wampanoag culture is just as fascinating today, as is the glimpse into Rowlandson’s Puritan mindset. She is both matter-of-fact and, heh, a little intense, a mixture of admirable and poignant and freak-me-out-y to the modern eye.
Rowlandson was about forty (they were SO not into specific dates and ages back then – but she was properly middle-aged heading on old per 1675) and living in Lancaster, Massachusetts with her reverend husband and some random number of surviving children (at least three, because that many were captured with her) when King Philip’s War busted out and all hell broke loose. (King Philip was a Wampanoag leader with a chip on his shoulder – and we learn a bit about that, tangentially, through Rowlandson’s narrative, as she describes the effects – she’s living with them – of the white settlers’ efforts to starve the local Natives out.) The Reverend Rowlandson was off trying to get the rest of Massachusetts to raise an army to fight off King Philip when the Wampanoag alliance attacked Lancaster and turned it into a smoking pit. Mrs. Rowlandson and her youngest were wounded by a gunshot and taken prisoner. She didn’t know what happened to most of the other people in her family, including two other children who surface later, other than the relatives she saw killed on the spot.
Then she was bundled up and taken on the run with the retreating Native forces. The colonial army, perpetually a day late and a dollar short, was nevertheless on the move and pursued them briefly…until it came to a river. Rivers are cold and wet! So the colonials gave up, for all that the Natives were in visual range (Rowlandson could certainly see the colonials) and had just hurriedly crossed the river themselves, and were in disarray. So much for le rescue. Onwards to slavery.
We see a mix of good and bad among the Wampanoag from the outset, and to Rowlandson’s credit – and believe you me, she does not like the Natives one teensy bit and considers them monsters – she relates both with an even hand. Her wounded child is permitted to ride on one of the horses – but at the same time, Natives seem to take a particular delight in coming to Rowlandson and informing her that once she’s sold into slavery, her new master isn’t going to put up with a damaged child and will promptly have “it” killed (Rowlandson herself refers to the poor girl as “it” frequently, and for understandable cause – the girl dies of her wounds, before her future master has the opportunity to off the child).
Life as a slave, in Rowlandson’s experience, was a hit-or-miss affair that depended, logically enough, upon the disposition of the wife of the household. Her master had a couple wives, and Rowlandson got stuck with one who liked to put on airs, with the general dismal personality to match. Mrs. Master (we don’t get names here) apparently did not see fit to feed Rowlandson routinely, nor to give her a place to sleep, leaving Rowlandson to beg scraps from other Natives – most of whom were generous, if unpredictable, with the tiny, tiny gleanings available to them. Those gleanings really are a sorry affair. The colonists’ starve-em-out policy seems to have been a smash hit. We’re talking boiled horse hoof, on a good day. Rowlandson also hires out her services as a seamstress and sometimes gets food or trade goods through that expedient, although again, she is a slave, and so sometimes the whole transaction comes down to “give up your apron and make some baby caps out of it, or I will knock your face in.” She yields; and she even goes out of her way to try to curry favor with her master (and particularly that snot-bitch mistress).
A Native kindly offers Rowlandson a Bible he plundered from one of the other towns the Wampanoag alliance pillaged, and she refers to it frequently. You’d think she’d have had the whole thing more or less memorized, but maybe not – she reads stretches of it for peace, and under particular duress she’ll flip open to a random page hoping for one of the “God loves you” remarks. If she gets one of those, she takes it as a miracle and is happy for days; if she does not, she simply muddles on anyway.
What is particularly fascinating is her lack of sense of entitlement on any particular tactical front (“tactical” is an important distinction – because of course she has no sense of any acceptable outcome, long-term, other than the whites defeating the Natives). As far as she’s concerned, if she’s suffering, God thinks she deserves it, and she’s not going to quibble, complain, or resent. She’ll just get on with it and try to be better. An amazing section has Rowlandson going through how the colonial army’s PATHETIC (she doesn’t say pathetic – that’s me talking) giving up at the river and the Native’s remarkable ability to find food despite the white starvation policy are signs of God’s greatness and benevolence. Wait – Mary? – are you suddenly saying that you’re on the Natives’ side? MAIS NON!!! It is part of God’s greatness and benevolence to STRENGTHEN A SCOURGE for the white settlers, who need to be CHASTISED for – well, she’s not sure what exactly, but something no doubt, and that’s God’s business, not hers. Whoa!
Rowlandson is bought back by her family at length (while the Rowlandsons’ personal assets were annihilated upon the destruction of Lancaster, other settlers pitch in to make up the twenty pounds), as is one of her captured children; the other escapes, as King Philip’s War fizzles out. Her successful return, even before the publication of her pamphlet, made her a minor celebrity, and we get a small sample of seventeenth-century colonial stardom in that Rowlandson makes several dear new friends and also apparently suffers some knify-tongued gossip about her assertion that the Natives did not try to do anything sexual to her. DUDES, aside from the fact that most of the Natives treated her within adequate bounds of respect anyway, they were STARVING (not a general libido-enhancer), and Rowlandson’s age made her pretty much a CRONE. Get over the sex thing, Puritans! (I doubt it, but I can always suggest.)
By Mary Rowlandson
64 pages, CreateSpace
Review by Kate Kasserman
The Captive is a memoir of Mary Rowlandson’s 1675 capture and enslavement by the Wampanoag alliance, and it made a big splash back in the seventeenth century upon its debut. Not only was it the first full-length (by the standards of the time, to wit, a pamphlet) literary work by an American woman, but it had NEWS FROM THE OTHER SIDE: the Native Americans. It would be fair to say that early American colonists were more than moderately concerned about their neighbors.
That window into the now-destroyed Wampanoag culture is just as fascinating today, as is the glimpse into Rowlandson’s Puritan mindset. She is both matter-of-fact and, heh, a little intense, a mixture of admirable and poignant and freak-me-out-y to the modern eye.
Rowlandson was about forty (they were SO not into specific dates and ages back then – but she was properly middle-aged heading on old per 1675) and living in Lancaster, Massachusetts with her reverend husband and some random number of surviving children (at least three, because that many were captured with her) when King Philip’s War busted out and all hell broke loose. (King Philip was a Wampanoag leader with a chip on his shoulder – and we learn a bit about that, tangentially, through Rowlandson’s narrative, as she describes the effects – she’s living with them – of the white settlers’ efforts to starve the local Natives out.) The Reverend Rowlandson was off trying to get the rest of Massachusetts to raise an army to fight off King Philip when the Wampanoag alliance attacked Lancaster and turned it into a smoking pit. Mrs. Rowlandson and her youngest were wounded by a gunshot and taken prisoner. She didn’t know what happened to most of the other people in her family, including two other children who surface later, other than the relatives she saw killed on the spot.
Then she was bundled up and taken on the run with the retreating Native forces. The colonial army, perpetually a day late and a dollar short, was nevertheless on the move and pursued them briefly…until it came to a river. Rivers are cold and wet! So the colonials gave up, for all that the Natives were in visual range (Rowlandson could certainly see the colonials) and had just hurriedly crossed the river themselves, and were in disarray. So much for le rescue. Onwards to slavery.
We see a mix of good and bad among the Wampanoag from the outset, and to Rowlandson’s credit – and believe you me, she does not like the Natives one teensy bit and considers them monsters – she relates both with an even hand. Her wounded child is permitted to ride on one of the horses – but at the same time, Natives seem to take a particular delight in coming to Rowlandson and informing her that once she’s sold into slavery, her new master isn’t going to put up with a damaged child and will promptly have “it” killed (Rowlandson herself refers to the poor girl as “it” frequently, and for understandable cause – the girl dies of her wounds, before her future master has the opportunity to off the child).
Life as a slave, in Rowlandson’s experience, was a hit-or-miss affair that depended, logically enough, upon the disposition of the wife of the household. Her master had a couple wives, and Rowlandson got stuck with one who liked to put on airs, with the general dismal personality to match. Mrs. Master (we don’t get names here) apparently did not see fit to feed Rowlandson routinely, nor to give her a place to sleep, leaving Rowlandson to beg scraps from other Natives – most of whom were generous, if unpredictable, with the tiny, tiny gleanings available to them. Those gleanings really are a sorry affair. The colonists’ starve-em-out policy seems to have been a smash hit. We’re talking boiled horse hoof, on a good day. Rowlandson also hires out her services as a seamstress and sometimes gets food or trade goods through that expedient, although again, she is a slave, and so sometimes the whole transaction comes down to “give up your apron and make some baby caps out of it, or I will knock your face in.” She yields; and she even goes out of her way to try to curry favor with her master (and particularly that snot-bitch mistress).
A Native kindly offers Rowlandson a Bible he plundered from one of the other towns the Wampanoag alliance pillaged, and she refers to it frequently. You’d think she’d have had the whole thing more or less memorized, but maybe not – she reads stretches of it for peace, and under particular duress she’ll flip open to a random page hoping for one of the “God loves you” remarks. If she gets one of those, she takes it as a miracle and is happy for days; if she does not, she simply muddles on anyway.
What is particularly fascinating is her lack of sense of entitlement on any particular tactical front (“tactical” is an important distinction – because of course she has no sense of any acceptable outcome, long-term, other than the whites defeating the Natives). As far as she’s concerned, if she’s suffering, God thinks she deserves it, and she’s not going to quibble, complain, or resent. She’ll just get on with it and try to be better. An amazing section has Rowlandson going through how the colonial army’s PATHETIC (she doesn’t say pathetic – that’s me talking) giving up at the river and the Native’s remarkable ability to find food despite the white starvation policy are signs of God’s greatness and benevolence. Wait – Mary? – are you suddenly saying that you’re on the Natives’ side? MAIS NON!!! It is part of God’s greatness and benevolence to STRENGTHEN A SCOURGE for the white settlers, who need to be CHASTISED for – well, she’s not sure what exactly, but something no doubt, and that’s God’s business, not hers. Whoa!
Rowlandson is bought back by her family at length (while the Rowlandsons’ personal assets were annihilated upon the destruction of Lancaster, other settlers pitch in to make up the twenty pounds), as is one of her captured children; the other escapes, as King Philip’s War fizzles out. Her successful return, even before the publication of her pamphlet, made her a minor celebrity, and we get a small sample of seventeenth-century colonial stardom in that Rowlandson makes several dear new friends and also apparently suffers some knify-tongued gossip about her assertion that the Natives did not try to do anything sexual to her. DUDES, aside from the fact that most of the Natives treated her within adequate bounds of respect anyway, they were STARVING (not a general libido-enhancer), and Rowlandson’s age made her pretty much a CRONE. Get over the sex thing, Puritans! (I doubt it, but I can always suggest.)
January 28, 2010
NOTHING TO LOSE
by Lee Child
531 pages, Dell
Review by Kate Kasserman
Okay, I am seriously bummed that this is the first Lee Child Jack Reacher vehicle I’m reviewing here, because Nothing to Lose is by far the weakest entry in the series so far (NTL is #12 – I have not yet read #13, Gone Tomorrow, but I hope it proves to be a return to form, and I will certainly give it a shot).
And I am wondering whether its flaws are ALL MY FAULT.
No, truly. Because I like Jack Reacher, and I like Jack Reacher stories. A lot of people do. He is hugely popular. And that places a pretty high burden on the author – both hard pressure (publisher: GIVE ME MONEY-MAKING PRODUCT, Child!) and soft (the great masses: we’re all waaaaaaaiting, Leeeeeee!). Nothing to Lose shows every sign of being too hastily assembled and insufficiently edited. Maddeningly, I can see the raw elements of what makes a fun Reacher book, but they just haven’t quite been smoothed out. And the seams really show.
One small example: okay, in a genre pulp thriller (which is what these ALMOST universally tasty morsels are), it is more the rule than the exception that you have to roll with some implausibilities and some “my goodness, somebody remembered to take their stupid-pills today for SURE” moments. The trick lies in making these painless. Here, we get some that approximate more closely a Civil War battlefield amputation. In this scene, Reacher has just been informed that an unknown girl, also a stranger in these parts, very, very much wants to talk to him and will be looking for him at the one diner in town. So he heads to the diner, with no other purpose than to find out what the girl wants. He scopes out the scene:
The diner was all lit up inside and three booths were occupied. A guy on his own, a young woman on her own, two guys together.
So, he talks to the young woman, right? No. No, he does not. He keeps hunting, hunting, hunting for this mystery girl.
The sidewalks close to the diner were deserted. No girls hanging around. No girls watching who was going in and coming out. No girls leaning on walls.
What about the single solitary girl in the booth in the diner where you’re supposed to meet a girl?
No girls hiding in the shadows.
YES BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GIRL IN THE DINER???
So Reacher waits for like about twelve billion years without seeing a girl come in or wander past before he figures out that the girl sitting in the diner is probably the girl in the diner he wants. The scene, to be fair, serves an ostensible purpose: Reacher realizes he’s busy thinking that everyone would treat the problem of “meet a stranger in a diner” the way he would – sneakily, relentlessly – while in fact ordinary people do something a little more pragmatic, like “if I want to meet someone in a diner, I will sit at that diner and wait.” But oh my heavens, I found it difficult to swallow that he would be quite so dumb.
And much of the book goeth thusly. People are just a bit too stupid, villains a bit too central-casting, coincidences a bit too contrived, motivations a bit too forced. A couple of very minor irritants I had noticed cropping up in earlier books are also more clearly visible here: the author is kind of in love with his creation Reacher (and ya know I can’t really blame him for this, because so am I, but still . . .), and he shows a curious lapse every now and then into preachiness. Now, I don’t object to authors having political views nor to these views inflecting or even being a direct part of authors’ works. Nor do I have to agree with those views in the slightest – Mishima fan here! FURTHER YET, if I were at a dinner party with Lee Child, and he started spouting off the views he’s pushed in his books, I would say “right on, brother!” to most, although not all, of them. And yet – they just come across as grating and tacked-on, like a product placement, in a Jack Reacher novel somehow. (Has anyone else noticed that the title of the book where he was pushing PETA has the acronym BLT? Hee hee . . .)
So, ’nuff of that. I would feel guilty to the core if I didn’t talk at least a little about what makes Reacher so flipping awesome as a character. Especially after slagging him off for his loboto-moment at the diner. We do ever so much love that solitary one-man balance-restoring machine: the avenging/defending cowboy, the (reasonably) honorable ronin, “you’re a good cop but ya just don’t follow the rules,” etc. etc. As long as he’s competent…and as long as he’s In The Right.
So Army-trained sharpshooter MP turned Establishment-rejecting nomad-with-principles Reacher is solidly inside this type and this genre, which would probably be enough on its own to make him reasonably popular; but what elevates him to particular interest, in my view, is Child’s wonderful knack for detailing Reacher’s highly concrete, almost grinding thought processes. Reacher ain’t quick, but he’s solid, he’s acutely observant, he’s relentless, and he will inevitably get there. That Reacher’s perceptions are so sharp and so tangible places us in a viscerally felt physical world – yes, even in this particular book! And tagging along with Reacher’s mind as he chews his way through the evidence and what is in most novels of the series (not this particular one) a well-drawn cast of secondary and tertiary characters is both fascinating and, in its way, in part because of its thoroughness I suppose, seductive.
Well, but anyway, if you aren’t familiar with the series, this isn’t the book to start with. This is a book largely, I think, for completists. Of course, if you start off at the beginning and get hooked, you may turn into one of those. And then you’ll be in the same boat as I am: hoping, hoping, hoping that we haven’t flogged Lee Child to prostration with our merciless love and that Reacher #13 gets its oomph back!
531 pages, Dell
Review by Kate Kasserman
Okay, I am seriously bummed that this is the first Lee Child Jack Reacher vehicle I’m reviewing here, because Nothing to Lose is by far the weakest entry in the series so far (NTL is #12 – I have not yet read #13, Gone Tomorrow, but I hope it proves to be a return to form, and I will certainly give it a shot).
And I am wondering whether its flaws are ALL MY FAULT.
No, truly. Because I like Jack Reacher, and I like Jack Reacher stories. A lot of people do. He is hugely popular. And that places a pretty high burden on the author – both hard pressure (publisher: GIVE ME MONEY-MAKING PRODUCT, Child!) and soft (the great masses: we’re all waaaaaaaiting, Leeeeeee!). Nothing to Lose shows every sign of being too hastily assembled and insufficiently edited. Maddeningly, I can see the raw elements of what makes a fun Reacher book, but they just haven’t quite been smoothed out. And the seams really show.
One small example: okay, in a genre pulp thriller (which is what these ALMOST universally tasty morsels are), it is more the rule than the exception that you have to roll with some implausibilities and some “my goodness, somebody remembered to take their stupid-pills today for SURE” moments. The trick lies in making these painless. Here, we get some that approximate more closely a Civil War battlefield amputation. In this scene, Reacher has just been informed that an unknown girl, also a stranger in these parts, very, very much wants to talk to him and will be looking for him at the one diner in town. So he heads to the diner, with no other purpose than to find out what the girl wants. He scopes out the scene:
The diner was all lit up inside and three booths were occupied. A guy on his own, a young woman on her own, two guys together.
So, he talks to the young woman, right? No. No, he does not. He keeps hunting, hunting, hunting for this mystery girl.
The sidewalks close to the diner were deserted. No girls hanging around. No girls watching who was going in and coming out. No girls leaning on walls.
What about the single solitary girl in the booth in the diner where you’re supposed to meet a girl?
No girls hiding in the shadows.
YES BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GIRL IN THE DINER???
So Reacher waits for like about twelve billion years without seeing a girl come in or wander past before he figures out that the girl sitting in the diner is probably the girl in the diner he wants. The scene, to be fair, serves an ostensible purpose: Reacher realizes he’s busy thinking that everyone would treat the problem of “meet a stranger in a diner” the way he would – sneakily, relentlessly – while in fact ordinary people do something a little more pragmatic, like “if I want to meet someone in a diner, I will sit at that diner and wait.” But oh my heavens, I found it difficult to swallow that he would be quite so dumb.
And much of the book goeth thusly. People are just a bit too stupid, villains a bit too central-casting, coincidences a bit too contrived, motivations a bit too forced. A couple of very minor irritants I had noticed cropping up in earlier books are also more clearly visible here: the author is kind of in love with his creation Reacher (and ya know I can’t really blame him for this, because so am I, but still . . .), and he shows a curious lapse every now and then into preachiness. Now, I don’t object to authors having political views nor to these views inflecting or even being a direct part of authors’ works. Nor do I have to agree with those views in the slightest – Mishima fan here! FURTHER YET, if I were at a dinner party with Lee Child, and he started spouting off the views he’s pushed in his books, I would say “right on, brother!” to most, although not all, of them. And yet – they just come across as grating and tacked-on, like a product placement, in a Jack Reacher novel somehow. (Has anyone else noticed that the title of the book where he was pushing PETA has the acronym BLT? Hee hee . . .)
So, ’nuff of that. I would feel guilty to the core if I didn’t talk at least a little about what makes Reacher so flipping awesome as a character. Especially after slagging him off for his loboto-moment at the diner. We do ever so much love that solitary one-man balance-restoring machine: the avenging/defending cowboy, the (reasonably) honorable ronin, “you’re a good cop but ya just don’t follow the rules,” etc. etc. As long as he’s competent…and as long as he’s In The Right.
So Army-trained sharpshooter MP turned Establishment-rejecting nomad-with-principles Reacher is solidly inside this type and this genre, which would probably be enough on its own to make him reasonably popular; but what elevates him to particular interest, in my view, is Child’s wonderful knack for detailing Reacher’s highly concrete, almost grinding thought processes. Reacher ain’t quick, but he’s solid, he’s acutely observant, he’s relentless, and he will inevitably get there. That Reacher’s perceptions are so sharp and so tangible places us in a viscerally felt physical world – yes, even in this particular book! And tagging along with Reacher’s mind as he chews his way through the evidence and what is in most novels of the series (not this particular one) a well-drawn cast of secondary and tertiary characters is both fascinating and, in its way, in part because of its thoroughness I suppose, seductive.
Well, but anyway, if you aren’t familiar with the series, this isn’t the book to start with. This is a book largely, I think, for completists. Of course, if you start off at the beginning and get hooked, you may turn into one of those. And then you’ll be in the same boat as I am: hoping, hoping, hoping that we haven’t flogged Lee Child to prostration with our merciless love and that Reacher #13 gets its oomph back!
January 15, 2010
CELIA GARTH
by Gwen Bristow
416 pages. Chicago Review Press.
Review by Kate Kasserman
Every now and then, a book surprises me.
I approached Celia Garth with decidedly modest expectations, and the beginning of the story more or less met them precisely. Celia is a plucky 20-year-old orphan in 1780 Charleston, working as a junior apprentice seamstress in a hoity-toity shop and dreaming of better things (love; respect for her extra-spiffy sewing skills, which languish unrecognized while she is tasked on low-level button-reinforcing work and the like; and in general “getting her way,” because, as a Southern character of a certain type, she is full unto bursting with “gumption”). That was a fine set-up. Celia’s fine eye for detail-work (even if no one seems to know it other than herself) is matched by her close observations of the people around her; these are rendered fascinatingly through the simple, direct language of a bright, introspective person with little formal education. So I liked Celia very well, for all that everyone (the author included) keeps calling her sassy. She wanted love and a place in the world – and she had the talent and the moxie and the looks (if she does say so herself) to earn them, if only she got the chance.
Well, she did get the chance, when a well-connected friend (later fiancé) sets her up with the opportunity to sew for a VERY hard-to-please customer who becomes Celia’s mentor and surrogate mother-figure – but right on the heels of that, Celia also got the war exploding around her ears, rendering her hard-earned connections impotent or even dangerous. I was happy enough with the story and the characters that the prospect of watching Celia struggle through to triumph was enough for me; it was a fine and pleasant journey, and I really didn’t need anything else.
Except Bristow pulled a particularly deft switcheroo on me and offered a great deal more.
The book is structured as a potboiler. You can read it cheerfully as such with no harm done, except that the ending might seem like a puzzling brief coda tacked onto the proper conclusion (in my view, it is anything but). There are dastardly deeds and backstabbing, grasping relatives and spies and traitors and hypocrites and MULTIPLE explosions and hair’s-breadth escapes and secret passages and death – almost an overabundance of drama, except that Celia’s matter-of-fact point of view keeps everything grounded – and besides, it really was that violent and tense in the then-and-there. The end-of-Revolutionary-War fighting in South Carolina, gentlepeeps, was deeply, deeply ugly, and Celia is thrust in its maw. Bristow, incidentally, nods to some facts that are inconvenient to the general storyline – like that the Patriot mobs were no more moderate in their predations and slaughters than the Loyalist ones, and the complexity of the entire slavery issue – but does not elaborate on them. It is conceivable to pick a bone with her over this, but I think doing so would be mistaken. This book is told from Celia’s perspective, for one; and for another, it is simply not possible to say everything about everything at once. At any rate, there is plenty of blood and thunder, and it is all very exciting on that score.
But the triumph of the book is that Celia – who does cave in for a while but ultimately never loses that gumption or, God help us all, the sass – thinks and learns so much from the terrible, soul-crushing events around her (warning: Bristow WILL KILL PEOPLE YOU LIKE). That sounds tame. It is not. She’s no Katie Scarlett O’Hara, just “keepin’ on keepin’ on” no matter how rough the sledding, although of course there is a rough, brutal glory in that.
Celia keeps on, all right, and she holds to her moral compass as well (are you listening, Scarlett?). But her understanding of human nature (including her own), and of human relationships, is gouged by terrible experience with scars that deepen her – gullies will do that – and reveal to her the trembling fragility of everything (love, friendship, home, status) to which she had always aspired as a rock upon which she could finally rest one happy day. Now she knows that day will never come. She discovers what she calls the “lonely places” inside every one of us – places that we simply cannot share, no matter how much we love and trust each other, no matter how great our intimacy and regard and even understanding. There is a fundamental solitude that cannot be breached, and cannot be explained. And there are “lonely places” between groups of people too; as when Celia realizes that her husband does not, and never will, understand what is passing between her and her surrogate mother Vivian – although Vivian understands just fine. It doesn’t mean that Celia and her husband (oh, I should mention, that is sort of a spoiler – you are in doubt for a good long while in the book whether C. will ever make it to the altar – but it is mostly not a spoiler, because there is plenty of question about it that I will not resolve or allude to here!) love each other any less.
That is a hard, cold lesson – that there are spaces that cannot be bridged, and that there is no perfect safety in the world, but only possibility, and hope, and faith, no matter how hard you try and even how much you succeed.
And thus we have the ending of the book, which comes after the “happily ever after” where Charleston is restored to America and the war is won and Celia and her new family are back on top. We don’t stop on that upbeat note, but continue on to Celia ruminating about some of the lonely places between herself and her husband – and then learning that with all the clean-up being performed in Charleston after its long, miserable siege and occupation, there is one thing that cannot come back: the English have stolen the expensive church-bells and whisked them away in their retreat.
The bells would remind her of so much. They would remind her – men like war, women don’t. Women like being peacetime homemakers, men don’t. Be gentle, Celia. Be understanding. You’ve got a rough road ahead of you and so has he. Everybody has lonely places. Even [redacted: her husband].
She stopped and turned around, and looked back across the housetops to the steeple. This was what the bells would say, but they were not there to say it. The steeple was silent.
Celia wanted to cry out, No! It must not be this way. She could not, she simply could not, accept the idea that she would never hear the bells again, that her child would never hear that lovely whisper of music. Standing on the sidewalk, she looked up at the silent steeple.
“Please,” she whispered, “please don’t let it be always silent! Please God, give us back the bells!”
We do not conclude, then, with certainty – we move on to the next step, which is the question, and the plea – only something that draws people together from their various lonely places can ever really bring them to where they can touch each other again. As a side note, not alluded to in the book (which ends with the lines above), the bells of St. Michael’s were indeed subsequently recovered in London and restored to the city and people that missed them. But I am quite certain that Celia would have found a way to keep soldiering on even if they had not.
416 pages. Chicago Review Press.
Review by Kate Kasserman
Every now and then, a book surprises me.
I approached Celia Garth with decidedly modest expectations, and the beginning of the story more or less met them precisely. Celia is a plucky 20-year-old orphan in 1780 Charleston, working as a junior apprentice seamstress in a hoity-toity shop and dreaming of better things (love; respect for her extra-spiffy sewing skills, which languish unrecognized while she is tasked on low-level button-reinforcing work and the like; and in general “getting her way,” because, as a Southern character of a certain type, she is full unto bursting with “gumption”). That was a fine set-up. Celia’s fine eye for detail-work (even if no one seems to know it other than herself) is matched by her close observations of the people around her; these are rendered fascinatingly through the simple, direct language of a bright, introspective person with little formal education. So I liked Celia very well, for all that everyone (the author included) keeps calling her sassy. She wanted love and a place in the world – and she had the talent and the moxie and the looks (if she does say so herself) to earn them, if only she got the chance.
Well, she did get the chance, when a well-connected friend (later fiancé) sets her up with the opportunity to sew for a VERY hard-to-please customer who becomes Celia’s mentor and surrogate mother-figure – but right on the heels of that, Celia also got the war exploding around her ears, rendering her hard-earned connections impotent or even dangerous. I was happy enough with the story and the characters that the prospect of watching Celia struggle through to triumph was enough for me; it was a fine and pleasant journey, and I really didn’t need anything else.
Except Bristow pulled a particularly deft switcheroo on me and offered a great deal more.
The book is structured as a potboiler. You can read it cheerfully as such with no harm done, except that the ending might seem like a puzzling brief coda tacked onto the proper conclusion (in my view, it is anything but). There are dastardly deeds and backstabbing, grasping relatives and spies and traitors and hypocrites and MULTIPLE explosions and hair’s-breadth escapes and secret passages and death – almost an overabundance of drama, except that Celia’s matter-of-fact point of view keeps everything grounded – and besides, it really was that violent and tense in the then-and-there. The end-of-Revolutionary-War fighting in South Carolina, gentlepeeps, was deeply, deeply ugly, and Celia is thrust in its maw. Bristow, incidentally, nods to some facts that are inconvenient to the general storyline – like that the Patriot mobs were no more moderate in their predations and slaughters than the Loyalist ones, and the complexity of the entire slavery issue – but does not elaborate on them. It is conceivable to pick a bone with her over this, but I think doing so would be mistaken. This book is told from Celia’s perspective, for one; and for another, it is simply not possible to say everything about everything at once. At any rate, there is plenty of blood and thunder, and it is all very exciting on that score.
But the triumph of the book is that Celia – who does cave in for a while but ultimately never loses that gumption or, God help us all, the sass – thinks and learns so much from the terrible, soul-crushing events around her (warning: Bristow WILL KILL PEOPLE YOU LIKE). That sounds tame. It is not. She’s no Katie Scarlett O’Hara, just “keepin’ on keepin’ on” no matter how rough the sledding, although of course there is a rough, brutal glory in that.
Celia keeps on, all right, and she holds to her moral compass as well (are you listening, Scarlett?). But her understanding of human nature (including her own), and of human relationships, is gouged by terrible experience with scars that deepen her – gullies will do that – and reveal to her the trembling fragility of everything (love, friendship, home, status) to which she had always aspired as a rock upon which she could finally rest one happy day. Now she knows that day will never come. She discovers what she calls the “lonely places” inside every one of us – places that we simply cannot share, no matter how much we love and trust each other, no matter how great our intimacy and regard and even understanding. There is a fundamental solitude that cannot be breached, and cannot be explained. And there are “lonely places” between groups of people too; as when Celia realizes that her husband does not, and never will, understand what is passing between her and her surrogate mother Vivian – although Vivian understands just fine. It doesn’t mean that Celia and her husband (oh, I should mention, that is sort of a spoiler – you are in doubt for a good long while in the book whether C. will ever make it to the altar – but it is mostly not a spoiler, because there is plenty of question about it that I will not resolve or allude to here!) love each other any less.
That is a hard, cold lesson – that there are spaces that cannot be bridged, and that there is no perfect safety in the world, but only possibility, and hope, and faith, no matter how hard you try and even how much you succeed.
And thus we have the ending of the book, which comes after the “happily ever after” where Charleston is restored to America and the war is won and Celia and her new family are back on top. We don’t stop on that upbeat note, but continue on to Celia ruminating about some of the lonely places between herself and her husband – and then learning that with all the clean-up being performed in Charleston after its long, miserable siege and occupation, there is one thing that cannot come back: the English have stolen the expensive church-bells and whisked them away in their retreat.
The bells would remind her of so much. They would remind her – men like war, women don’t. Women like being peacetime homemakers, men don’t. Be gentle, Celia. Be understanding. You’ve got a rough road ahead of you and so has he. Everybody has lonely places. Even [redacted: her husband].
She stopped and turned around, and looked back across the housetops to the steeple. This was what the bells would say, but they were not there to say it. The steeple was silent.
Celia wanted to cry out, No! It must not be this way. She could not, she simply could not, accept the idea that she would never hear the bells again, that her child would never hear that lovely whisper of music. Standing on the sidewalk, she looked up at the silent steeple.
“Please,” she whispered, “please don’t let it be always silent! Please God, give us back the bells!”
We do not conclude, then, with certainty – we move on to the next step, which is the question, and the plea – only something that draws people together from their various lonely places can ever really bring them to where they can touch each other again. As a side note, not alluded to in the book (which ends with the lines above), the bells of St. Michael’s were indeed subsequently recovered in London and restored to the city and people that missed them. But I am quite certain that Celia would have found a way to keep soldiering on even if they had not.
January 5, 2010
BEAU BRUMMELL
The Ultimate Man of Style
by Ian Kelly
416 pages, Free Press
Review by Kate Kasserman
George “Beau” Brummell was a commoner whose family had done well enough to plop him, with the usual high hopes of strivers, into a world that was a bit (and later considerably) above the class into which he’d been born. This well-researched, very readable book looks at just exactly how he managed his climb – yes, pretty much what he’s famous for, the art of lookin’ good – and documents his inevitable fall with the same cold-eyed clarity. Be warned in advance: the fall is deep and hard. And no, Brummell never climbs out of it.
It wouldn’t make much sense to discuss someone’s social ascendancy without talking about the society that he briefly ruled, and Beau Brummell paints an admirably detailed picture of Regency London and a variety of the characters populating its hoity-toity upper branches (some of ’em mighty deplorable, some admirable, and many, like Brummell himself, just kind of depressing), as well as the social forces grinding away in the sub-basement of the unconscious.
England was having a “manliness” moment. Her feelings apparently had been considerably dinged by losing America, resulting in a frenzy of self-criticism that she simply had produced weedy little half-men (er, of all the many, many forces contributing to that surprise upset war, there was certainly no lack of courage or guts or general martial ability on the part of the British; but try explaining that to wounded amour-propre!). Schools got tough (even savage) in order to raise a hardier breed (although Kelly makes a compelling argument that mercilessly beating children had zero impact on manliness while causing a sizable uptick in a certain psychosexual development now known as “the English vice”). And, come the early 19th century, Napoleon offered a fine proving-ground for Britons to demonstrate their mettle.
Beau Brummell did not want to fight Napoleon. The nation’s finest paramilitary indoctrination could not change the fact that he was, at the core, a butterfly and no Spartan. However, he did admire the Spartans’ clothes sense (although he seems to have preferred the Athenian); and making clothes look manlier was Brummell’s wildly popular contribution to the age. Lace! Is! For! Girls! Picking whisper-soft fabric for tight trousers is for boys.
Like many people who are certainly not stupid but just as surely not inclined towards abstract thought, Brummell blithely lived some face-smacking contradictions in apparent total oblivion to them. A charming, sweet child who stuck up for the underdog turned into a bit of a bullying yahoo when he climbed to the top of the social ladder. I had been rather looking forward to seeing examples of Brummell’s wit, and they were an eye-opener. He seems to have had two modes: “Your socks suck” and “I have more friends than you.” Wit it ain’t; I can imagine the lines being amusing in the moment (as long as one’s own socks were not the focus of attention), but everything would hang on the delivery. The content is null.
And that is the tragedy of poor Brummell. He simply refused to put any meat under the salt, prancing off tra-la-la with the wildly expensive tastes he had invented and, disastrously, gambling even when he could not afford to do so. That he had such high-powered connections let him run astonishingly into debt, because everyone assumed (quite reasonably) that he could snap his manicured fingers and get a job whenever he needed one. He probably could have, if he’d done so promptly enough; but it wouldn’t have been stylish, so he didn’t. (Also, it would not have been fun.) And he trousered and cravatted and snuffed and gambled his way into a pit that ground him up for hamburger meat.
When Brummell’s debts drove him to France (and finally to the expedient of begging for work, when it was too late and he could barely get anything), he couldn’t dress the way he liked and his friends were far away (the ones he hadn’t alienated by insulting their socks), but the kicker is that his high-living antics had left him with a raging case of syphilis that shredded both his body and mind just when he needed all his resources in order to put himself back on his feet. And the syphilis won – with agonizing slowness.
The final part of the book examines Brummell’s fall as carefully as it documented his rise and ascendancy, and it is pretty grim stuff – but also offers a meaningful credit to both author and subject. The morality-play potential of the topic is bald (“Tut tut, you didn’t get a job and you overspent your means and you were not too nice at some very injudicious moments – a plague of boils and dementia for you!”), but Kelly stays his hand and simply lays out the facts he has dug out with such care. And Brummell himself – well, he stayed the course. He plastered a smile on his face, when his mind was working anyway, and did the best he could with what he had at hand. I suppose you could say that he just didn’t learn, and maybe there’s nothing laudable in it. But when a butterfly is savaged by a bird and lies on the ground with half a mangled wing, it isn’t usually going to turn into a cat and spring forward to triumph. But maybe it will try to flutter its remaining half-wing a little; and that is beautiful too, in its way. It certainly has style.
by Ian Kelly
416 pages, Free Press
Review by Kate Kasserman
George “Beau” Brummell was a commoner whose family had done well enough to plop him, with the usual high hopes of strivers, into a world that was a bit (and later considerably) above the class into which he’d been born. This well-researched, very readable book looks at just exactly how he managed his climb – yes, pretty much what he’s famous for, the art of lookin’ good – and documents his inevitable fall with the same cold-eyed clarity. Be warned in advance: the fall is deep and hard. And no, Brummell never climbs out of it.
It wouldn’t make much sense to discuss someone’s social ascendancy without talking about the society that he briefly ruled, and Beau Brummell paints an admirably detailed picture of Regency London and a variety of the characters populating its hoity-toity upper branches (some of ’em mighty deplorable, some admirable, and many, like Brummell himself, just kind of depressing), as well as the social forces grinding away in the sub-basement of the unconscious.
England was having a “manliness” moment. Her feelings apparently had been considerably dinged by losing America, resulting in a frenzy of self-criticism that she simply had produced weedy little half-men (er, of all the many, many forces contributing to that surprise upset war, there was certainly no lack of courage or guts or general martial ability on the part of the British; but try explaining that to wounded amour-propre!). Schools got tough (even savage) in order to raise a hardier breed (although Kelly makes a compelling argument that mercilessly beating children had zero impact on manliness while causing a sizable uptick in a certain psychosexual development now known as “the English vice”). And, come the early 19th century, Napoleon offered a fine proving-ground for Britons to demonstrate their mettle.
Beau Brummell did not want to fight Napoleon. The nation’s finest paramilitary indoctrination could not change the fact that he was, at the core, a butterfly and no Spartan. However, he did admire the Spartans’ clothes sense (although he seems to have preferred the Athenian); and making clothes look manlier was Brummell’s wildly popular contribution to the age. Lace! Is! For! Girls! Picking whisper-soft fabric for tight trousers is for boys.
Like many people who are certainly not stupid but just as surely not inclined towards abstract thought, Brummell blithely lived some face-smacking contradictions in apparent total oblivion to them. A charming, sweet child who stuck up for the underdog turned into a bit of a bullying yahoo when he climbed to the top of the social ladder. I had been rather looking forward to seeing examples of Brummell’s wit, and they were an eye-opener. He seems to have had two modes: “Your socks suck” and “I have more friends than you.” Wit it ain’t; I can imagine the lines being amusing in the moment (as long as one’s own socks were not the focus of attention), but everything would hang on the delivery. The content is null.
And that is the tragedy of poor Brummell. He simply refused to put any meat under the salt, prancing off tra-la-la with the wildly expensive tastes he had invented and, disastrously, gambling even when he could not afford to do so. That he had such high-powered connections let him run astonishingly into debt, because everyone assumed (quite reasonably) that he could snap his manicured fingers and get a job whenever he needed one. He probably could have, if he’d done so promptly enough; but it wouldn’t have been stylish, so he didn’t. (Also, it would not have been fun.) And he trousered and cravatted and snuffed and gambled his way into a pit that ground him up for hamburger meat.
When Brummell’s debts drove him to France (and finally to the expedient of begging for work, when it was too late and he could barely get anything), he couldn’t dress the way he liked and his friends were far away (the ones he hadn’t alienated by insulting their socks), but the kicker is that his high-living antics had left him with a raging case of syphilis that shredded both his body and mind just when he needed all his resources in order to put himself back on his feet. And the syphilis won – with agonizing slowness.
The final part of the book examines Brummell’s fall as carefully as it documented his rise and ascendancy, and it is pretty grim stuff – but also offers a meaningful credit to both author and subject. The morality-play potential of the topic is bald (“Tut tut, you didn’t get a job and you overspent your means and you were not too nice at some very injudicious moments – a plague of boils and dementia for you!”), but Kelly stays his hand and simply lays out the facts he has dug out with such care. And Brummell himself – well, he stayed the course. He plastered a smile on his face, when his mind was working anyway, and did the best he could with what he had at hand. I suppose you could say that he just didn’t learn, and maybe there’s nothing laudable in it. But when a butterfly is savaged by a bird and lies on the ground with half a mangled wing, it isn’t usually going to turn into a cat and spring forward to triumph. But maybe it will try to flutter its remaining half-wing a little; and that is beautiful too, in its way. It certainly has style.
December 31, 2009
THE ORPHAN’S TALES:
In the Cities of Coin and Spice
by Catherynne M. Valente
Illustrated.
528 pages, Spectra.
Review by Kate Kasserman
I have read a great many fairy tales. As in not just the Brothers Grimm and Andrew Lang but the complete 1001 Nights (thank you, Mr. Burton!). I am very fond of the form; but humanity has not produced inexhaustible reserves of it, and, let’s face it, the stories do get a little interchangeable and repetitive at times (I cite again my experience with 1001 Nights – just so you know, Scheherazade totally cheated, not that I blame her, and trotted out the same tale with almost no variation more than once).
So I was happy to discover In the Cities of Coin and Spice at the bookstore, even though it is book #2 of a two-book series and the first volume nowhere in sight. “They’re fairy tales,” I reasoned, “it won’t matter.” And in fact I was quite correct (always cause for celebration!): while there are a few references to stories I did not know in this book, presumably covered in the first volume, this detracts nothing from a strange and interesting journey.
The basic set-up is that we have some beautiful starving girl skulking in the vast gardens of a Sultan’s palace, and she has a whole lotta stories written in itsy-bitsy letters across her eyelids. The heir apparent, a pleasant boy (it is good when princes are pleasant), sneaks out of the palace to bring her whatever food she’ll accept and listen to her read from her eyelids (except for the last stories, which are inked where she cannot read and so are related by him to her).
The stories themselves are both nesting and interlocked: nesting in the sense that you will be in the middle of a seventh-son carried by the winds into a dead city where he is forced to work minting coins, and he makes friends with a girl who turns out to be a hybrid girl-tree-cow, and she explains her peculiar nature with…another story, which goes on its own path and then returns to the seventh-son, and so forth; and interlocking in that if you’re curious, for example, what happens to the manticore (I particularly liked that manticore), who is really only a tangential thing at her first appearance, well, you do find out, but only in the context of another story much later on.
Valente knows her fairy tales well, putting her own twist on even such far-flung inventions as the kappa (sprites with hollow heads that contain water that can be spilled out if they, tragically polite when they are not biting people – it will not come as a surprise, I think, that the kappa come to us thanks to Japan – happen to bow while on land). And she just makes stuff up, too – a lot of stuff, a positive glut of stuff, which satisfies one of the basic, fundamental requirements of a fairy-tale: just saying, “whoa, look at THAT!”
As in traditional fairy tales, friendship and loyalty are placed at greatest value (although not without cost, sometimes extreme); but unlike traditional stories, romantic love really does not fare too well. It is pretty much guaranteed to make you eat or be eaten (yikes!). This makes for interesting reading – and at least we do have friendship with which to console ourselves in inky-orphan-world – although I do wonder how this perspective would play with children and teenagers, who are generally disposed to want to take a more upbeat view of such matters.
However, this dysphoric view of issues romantic, and the matter-of-fact violence both physical and emotional that inhabits most – okay, pretty much all – of the stories kept them from feeling, well, a bit twee, as a fairy-tale might unless it is careful to keep its teeth. Blood, bone, flesh, and misery are the price exacted for any purpose or progress in the characters’ lives and quests, an interesting economy that is no less true in the artist-colony of exhausted Ajanabh (the city of spice) than it is in the dead, ravenous Marrow (the city of coin, which turns unwanted children’s bones into hard cash).
Haven’t I made it all sound delightful? But actually, it is fun, and very quick reading (each story chapter is only a few pages long). There is happiness at the end of all the travail, for some of the characters you would expect and others you might not – although, even if the series has concluded, I know better than to think “the end” is the end. There is no happily-ever-after in this world; only happy-for-now, and a job well done – for the moment, until the next adventure – now the unwritten ones.
by Catherynne M. Valente
Illustrated.
528 pages, Spectra.
Review by Kate Kasserman
I have read a great many fairy tales. As in not just the Brothers Grimm and Andrew Lang but the complete 1001 Nights (thank you, Mr. Burton!). I am very fond of the form; but humanity has not produced inexhaustible reserves of it, and, let’s face it, the stories do get a little interchangeable and repetitive at times (I cite again my experience with 1001 Nights – just so you know, Scheherazade totally cheated, not that I blame her, and trotted out the same tale with almost no variation more than once).
So I was happy to discover In the Cities of Coin and Spice at the bookstore, even though it is book #2 of a two-book series and the first volume nowhere in sight. “They’re fairy tales,” I reasoned, “it won’t matter.” And in fact I was quite correct (always cause for celebration!): while there are a few references to stories I did not know in this book, presumably covered in the first volume, this detracts nothing from a strange and interesting journey.
The basic set-up is that we have some beautiful starving girl skulking in the vast gardens of a Sultan’s palace, and she has a whole lotta stories written in itsy-bitsy letters across her eyelids. The heir apparent, a pleasant boy (it is good when princes are pleasant), sneaks out of the palace to bring her whatever food she’ll accept and listen to her read from her eyelids (except for the last stories, which are inked where she cannot read and so are related by him to her).
The stories themselves are both nesting and interlocked: nesting in the sense that you will be in the middle of a seventh-son carried by the winds into a dead city where he is forced to work minting coins, and he makes friends with a girl who turns out to be a hybrid girl-tree-cow, and she explains her peculiar nature with…another story, which goes on its own path and then returns to the seventh-son, and so forth; and interlocking in that if you’re curious, for example, what happens to the manticore (I particularly liked that manticore), who is really only a tangential thing at her first appearance, well, you do find out, but only in the context of another story much later on.
Valente knows her fairy tales well, putting her own twist on even such far-flung inventions as the kappa (sprites with hollow heads that contain water that can be spilled out if they, tragically polite when they are not biting people – it will not come as a surprise, I think, that the kappa come to us thanks to Japan – happen to bow while on land). And she just makes stuff up, too – a lot of stuff, a positive glut of stuff, which satisfies one of the basic, fundamental requirements of a fairy-tale: just saying, “whoa, look at THAT!”
As in traditional fairy tales, friendship and loyalty are placed at greatest value (although not without cost, sometimes extreme); but unlike traditional stories, romantic love really does not fare too well. It is pretty much guaranteed to make you eat or be eaten (yikes!). This makes for interesting reading – and at least we do have friendship with which to console ourselves in inky-orphan-world – although I do wonder how this perspective would play with children and teenagers, who are generally disposed to want to take a more upbeat view of such matters.
However, this dysphoric view of issues romantic, and the matter-of-fact violence both physical and emotional that inhabits most – okay, pretty much all – of the stories kept them from feeling, well, a bit twee, as a fairy-tale might unless it is careful to keep its teeth. Blood, bone, flesh, and misery are the price exacted for any purpose or progress in the characters’ lives and quests, an interesting economy that is no less true in the artist-colony of exhausted Ajanabh (the city of spice) than it is in the dead, ravenous Marrow (the city of coin, which turns unwanted children’s bones into hard cash).
Haven’t I made it all sound delightful? But actually, it is fun, and very quick reading (each story chapter is only a few pages long). There is happiness at the end of all the travail, for some of the characters you would expect and others you might not – although, even if the series has concluded, I know better than to think “the end” is the end. There is no happily-ever-after in this world; only happy-for-now, and a job well done – for the moment, until the next adventure – now the unwritten ones.
December 27, 2009
SPECIAL ASSIGNMENTS
by Boris Akunin
352 pages, Random House
Review by Kate Kasserman
Confession: I miss those nineteenth-century Russian writers. I wish they hadn’t all gone and died. Is it worth loving anything in the world when I know that my love lacks the strength to yank a single small Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Nikolai Gogol out of the moldering grave and plop him back to work at his desk? I wonder sometimes.
Be that as it may, I have kept half a wounded eye on Russia’s popular literature, hoping that one day lightning might strike again (literature, not my eye). Years of waiting didn’t seem to be paying off; the dismal Sergei Lukyanenko almost made me give up in despair. I started to fear that delicious hot/cold/grotesque/romantic/brutal philosopho-psycho élan might have – well, not vanished, but perhaps been sublimated into tweets (that I cannot read, as I have no Russian). Ah well; I took a long swallow of icy vodka for sustenance and endured my disappointment.
And then came Boris Akunin. (This is the pseudonym for a certain Grigory Chkhartishvili – and now you know why he needs a pseudonym.)
Akunin writes genre fiction. He does not write literature, except in the meta-meta sense that he is, by his assertion, trying to cover in the course of his project (may it never end!) every subtype of crime/mystery story. (Anybody who takes on the name B. Akunin obviously has some meta-meta leanings, but these are largely absent from his novels.) His books are set in late nineteenth-century Russia, and, despite quite a few clearly modern elements, almost feel as if they could have been written then. Special Assignments is the sixth book in the Erast Fandorin series, and it comprises two long novellas linked loosely by Jack-themed antagonists (of Spades and the Ripper) and the introduction of Anisii Tulipov, a painfully sincere, down-on-his-luck naïf whom Fandorin takes under his wing as an assistant.
Anyone who has followed the series is well aware that Fandorin himself started out as just such a naïf (although a considerably better-looking one than Tulipov). He is certainly one no longer: fame, respect, well-honed skills, the confidence born of a long string of successes, money, wicked Japanese martial arts ability, other people’s hot wives – he’s seriously set.
This could make my dear Fandorin a little dull, for all that one would always want him on one’s side. Overwhelming superiority lacketh a certain narrative tension. And in fact now that Fandorin has come into his own, Akunin spends considerably less time following the thoughts of our protagonist and considerably more in the minds of secondary and even tertiary characters as each story unfolds. The vivid detail with which he renders the supporting cast and the red-blooded thumping pace of the plots prevent this technique from feeling disjointed or distracting. When Fandorin does move to center stage, it is either because he is struggling (he is not the only cleverkins in the world, after all, and he still has a heart) or because he is about to do or say something that we REALLY want to see.
The first novella in Special Assignments, The Jack of Spades, is a twisty, light-hearted caper in which the bulk of the ingenuity is demonstrated by the not-so-villainous conman Momos in his various mercantile-cum-fun-generating endeavors. Momos probably could have carried on indefinitely with his cheerful peripatetic grifting lifestyle in unmolested peace if he hadn’t been so delighted with himself that he decided to scam the governor (and Fandorin’s protector) Prince Dolgorukoi to see whether he could get away with it (yes, Momos can get away with it – except insofar as his spoils come with the free bonus of putting Fandorin on his tail). The fun here is watching the characters writhe and scheme, and seeing just how nervy Momos will get (quite) – you never really doubt how the story is going to end, but the scenery along the way is fantastic, and filled with plenty of unexpected turns. The pimply, big-eared Tulipov even gets some smokin’ con-girl action!
In contrast – heavy contrast – the second novella, The Decorator, starts out right nasty and grows only darker. A deeply unpleasant murder reminds Fandorin (fresh from a recent stay in London) of Jack the Ripper – and as he investigates, he learns that the Moscow murder he’s trying to solve is not the first of its kind in the city. It’s unquestionably the work of a serial killer who Fandorin thinks is Jack himself.
It’s hard to find much new territory to mine in serial killers and JTR in particular, and while the killings and the murderer’s internal ruminations are appropriately vile, the interest lies not so much in the how of it all (as with the prior novella) but rather the effect that the investigation has on Fandorin and everyone else involved – and also, the who. We are presented with a number of viable prospects for that honor – failed doctors, revolutionaries, butchers, grave-diggers, and so on, all with their own stories – as well as plenty of red herrings, some subtle and some slap-you-in-the-face.
I am not spoiling anything by saying that Fandorin comes out on top in the end. Fandorin always does come out on top, at least reasonably so – you can trust him to figure out what happened and either to fix it or keep it from happening again (at least in his neck of the woods). But his wins are never perfect. The law of Akunin-world goes thusly: when you succeed, you still fail. But the converse doesn’t hold: when you fail, you don’t succeed, darling. Organize your efforts accordingly – and live with the amusement, or the undying pain, as the situation dictates.
The price paid in The Decorator is sickening in many levels – and I will not say more than that on the topic, because it is best to go into it blind. So that you can feel like you’ve been smacked on the head with a hammer! And drained of blood! In America, for these circumstances, we generally “smile when we say that.” Akunin makes it beautiful.
352 pages, Random House
Review by Kate Kasserman
Confession: I miss those nineteenth-century Russian writers. I wish they hadn’t all gone and died. Is it worth loving anything in the world when I know that my love lacks the strength to yank a single small Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Nikolai Gogol out of the moldering grave and plop him back to work at his desk? I wonder sometimes.
Be that as it may, I have kept half a wounded eye on Russia’s popular literature, hoping that one day lightning might strike again (literature, not my eye). Years of waiting didn’t seem to be paying off; the dismal Sergei Lukyanenko almost made me give up in despair. I started to fear that delicious hot/cold/grotesque/romantic/brutal philosopho-psycho élan might have – well, not vanished, but perhaps been sublimated into tweets (that I cannot read, as I have no Russian). Ah well; I took a long swallow of icy vodka for sustenance and endured my disappointment.
And then came Boris Akunin. (This is the pseudonym for a certain Grigory Chkhartishvili – and now you know why he needs a pseudonym.)
Akunin writes genre fiction. He does not write literature, except in the meta-meta sense that he is, by his assertion, trying to cover in the course of his project (may it never end!) every subtype of crime/mystery story. (Anybody who takes on the name B. Akunin obviously has some meta-meta leanings, but these are largely absent from his novels.) His books are set in late nineteenth-century Russia, and, despite quite a few clearly modern elements, almost feel as if they could have been written then. Special Assignments is the sixth book in the Erast Fandorin series, and it comprises two long novellas linked loosely by Jack-themed antagonists (of Spades and the Ripper) and the introduction of Anisii Tulipov, a painfully sincere, down-on-his-luck naïf whom Fandorin takes under his wing as an assistant.
Anyone who has followed the series is well aware that Fandorin himself started out as just such a naïf (although a considerably better-looking one than Tulipov). He is certainly one no longer: fame, respect, well-honed skills, the confidence born of a long string of successes, money, wicked Japanese martial arts ability, other people’s hot wives – he’s seriously set.
This could make my dear Fandorin a little dull, for all that one would always want him on one’s side. Overwhelming superiority lacketh a certain narrative tension. And in fact now that Fandorin has come into his own, Akunin spends considerably less time following the thoughts of our protagonist and considerably more in the minds of secondary and even tertiary characters as each story unfolds. The vivid detail with which he renders the supporting cast and the red-blooded thumping pace of the plots prevent this technique from feeling disjointed or distracting. When Fandorin does move to center stage, it is either because he is struggling (he is not the only cleverkins in the world, after all, and he still has a heart) or because he is about to do or say something that we REALLY want to see.
The first novella in Special Assignments, The Jack of Spades, is a twisty, light-hearted caper in which the bulk of the ingenuity is demonstrated by the not-so-villainous conman Momos in his various mercantile-cum-fun-generating endeavors. Momos probably could have carried on indefinitely with his cheerful peripatetic grifting lifestyle in unmolested peace if he hadn’t been so delighted with himself that he decided to scam the governor (and Fandorin’s protector) Prince Dolgorukoi to see whether he could get away with it (yes, Momos can get away with it – except insofar as his spoils come with the free bonus of putting Fandorin on his tail). The fun here is watching the characters writhe and scheme, and seeing just how nervy Momos will get (quite) – you never really doubt how the story is going to end, but the scenery along the way is fantastic, and filled with plenty of unexpected turns. The pimply, big-eared Tulipov even gets some smokin’ con-girl action!
In contrast – heavy contrast – the second novella, The Decorator, starts out right nasty and grows only darker. A deeply unpleasant murder reminds Fandorin (fresh from a recent stay in London) of Jack the Ripper – and as he investigates, he learns that the Moscow murder he’s trying to solve is not the first of its kind in the city. It’s unquestionably the work of a serial killer who Fandorin thinks is Jack himself.
It’s hard to find much new territory to mine in serial killers and JTR in particular, and while the killings and the murderer’s internal ruminations are appropriately vile, the interest lies not so much in the how of it all (as with the prior novella) but rather the effect that the investigation has on Fandorin and everyone else involved – and also, the who. We are presented with a number of viable prospects for that honor – failed doctors, revolutionaries, butchers, grave-diggers, and so on, all with their own stories – as well as plenty of red herrings, some subtle and some slap-you-in-the-face.
I am not spoiling anything by saying that Fandorin comes out on top in the end. Fandorin always does come out on top, at least reasonably so – you can trust him to figure out what happened and either to fix it or keep it from happening again (at least in his neck of the woods). But his wins are never perfect. The law of Akunin-world goes thusly: when you succeed, you still fail. But the converse doesn’t hold: when you fail, you don’t succeed, darling. Organize your efforts accordingly – and live with the amusement, or the undying pain, as the situation dictates.
The price paid in The Decorator is sickening in many levels – and I will not say more than that on the topic, because it is best to go into it blind. So that you can feel like you’ve been smacked on the head with a hammer! And drained of blood! In America, for these circumstances, we generally “smile when we say that.” Akunin makes it beautiful.
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