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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

It has been a very long time since I first read this book, the 1962 novel that made Muriel Spark famous. It must be the movie I'm remembering when I try to bring up the story and its meaning because the book surprised me when I read it the other day. I didn't remember the subtleness under its seeming superficiality or the extreme complexity of the character Sandy, one of the girls in Miss Brodie's "set."

It's a book about a very progressive teacher at a conservative girls school in Edinburgh in the 1930s and her unorthodox teaching methods. She would write a long division on the blackboard (in case the class was interrupted by a visit from the headmistress) and then ignoring math told the girls about her summer vacation in Italy. She had the girls prop up their history books and told them how Mussolini had solved the unemployment problem. She took the girls to the theater, museums, movies, and on an excursion through the poorer sections of the city. She had them to tea and told them about her sex life.

Six girls have been chosen by Miss Brodie as her particular pets, the creme de la creme. When they leave the lower school and no longer have her as a teacher she continues to influence them in many ways. But one of them eventually betrays her to the headmistress, a woman who had been wanting to find an excuse to fire Miss Brodie even though she is still in her prime.

The structure of the book is unusual, something else I had not noticed before. It takes place all at once - an effect produced by constant shifting from the present to the medium future, back to the present, to the far future, back to the present, to the medium future again, and so on. At the beginning of the story we know that someone in the Brodie set has betrayed their teacher but it isn't until two thirds of the way through the book we discover who did it. And it isn't until the end that we learn exactly what she did.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has made its way onto many lists of the best novels of the year, decade, and even the 20th century. I used to wonder why. Now I know and I hope to have time to watch the movie and then read the book again and perhaps even look out some literary criticism about it. Meanwhile you need to read it.

2012  No 79

Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the EIS

The Parable of the Clinician and the Epidemiologist

The brown river usually flows lazily through the middle of town. But today it is a torrent carrying human bodies. Some, still alive, are gasping for air and thrashing the water.

Approaching the river to enjoy lunch on its banks, two doctors, horrified by what they see, begin to haul people out of the water. There are no signs of violence, but the victims' eyes are glazed, their weak pulses racing.

The doctors cannot keep up with the flow of bodies. They save a few and watch helplessly as the others drift beyond them.

Suddenly, one of the doctors lowers an old man to the ground and starts to run. "What are you doing?" yells the other doctor. "For God's sake, help me save these people!"

Without stopping, she yells back over her shoulder, "I'm going upstream to find out why they're falling in."

This is the epigraph of Mark Pendergrast's Inside the Outbreaks, a history of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a part of the US Centers for Disease Control. It summarizes, I think, the sort of thing EIS doctors do and the resentment they sometimes feel from doctors who are trying to stem an Ebola epidemic in the Congo or a flu outbreak in Hong Kong.

Epidemiology is inherently interesting. Every incident is a sort of medical detective story, as recognized by Berton Roueche in his now-famous book, The Medical Detectives, a book that was published in 1980 but is still relevant enough to have provided the plots for numerous House episodes. I used to look for Roueche's "Annals of Modern Medicine" columns in the New Yorker knowing they would be entertaining as well as puzzling and sometimes shocking. They usually told of an at least marginally heroic doctor who was able to figure out why two patients had turned up in the local hospital having turned blue, or why a man had grown three breasts, or why another man had the hiccups - for 27 years.

Books like this usually describe less than a dozen cases in depth but Pendergrast's book is a history of the EIS and so he tries to give the reader a feeling for the constant motion of these doctors (and later nurses, veterinarians, nutritionists, etc.) as they respond to one case after another. An entire family is in the hospital near death. Navajos in the Four Corners Area are succumbing to an unidentifiable respiratory problem. A little girl rapidly goes into multiple organ collapse for no apparent reason. Staff and patients in an African hospital are contracting a horrifying disease that is killing more than 90% of those who have it.

Sometimes the doctors are successful, as they were with the Four Corners problem. Working with the medicine men of the Navajo tribe, who say that legend connects this problem with very wet springs and the many small animals that come down out of the mountains to eat the abundant food produced, they were able to identify a hantavirus spread by the urine of mice. You don't have to have mice running around your house to acquire this - the urine dries and much later the dust kicked up by cleaning house spreads the virus.

Pathologists recognize a virus akin to Marburg and Lassa Fever and trace it to the area of the Ebola River after which it is named. They are able to trace a patient's meal of fast food hamburgers contaminated with E coli. After years of detailed record keeping they connect Reyes Syndrome with aspirin given to children.

Sometimes they are unsuccessful. They are unable to explain why patients and staff at St Elizabeth's hospital in DC are stricken with an unusually deadly respiratory illness. Or why the same illness fells a number of people in Pontiac, Michigan, some years later. In that case they were ultimately successful in identifying a virus that was killing veterans at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia, the same virus they had found at St Elizabeth's and in Pontiac years before. They named the condition Legionnaires Disease and there are still many cases each year in the US.

The book is an institutional history so there are a lot of names and a good deal of information about funding and reorganization as well as the stories of men and women rushing in the middle of the night to some small American city or an almost inaccessible African village. But the dozens of one-page stories about what the doctors of the EIS actually do - stories we don't usually read about in the news - gives the reader a good idea of the hard work and ingenuity of these people who work so hard to help keep us all a little safer.

2012  No 78

The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West

Someone in my online Trollope group recommended this novel as something a Trollope lover would like and she/he was right. The book, though written some 50 years after most of Trollope's novels, and being, of course, Edwardian rather than Victorian, captures much of the day to day life of people living on a country estate and in London in a time that presages great change.

The main character in the novel is Chevron, a house that is much beloved of Sebastian, the young duke who has inherited it and all its appurtenances. Chevron is based on Knole House where Vita Sackville-West grew up, a house she loved more than any human I think, but property that she couldn't inherit as it had to go to the next-in-line male. She and her husband, Harold Nicholson, later bought Sissinghurst and created there one of the finest gardens in England.

The Edwardians starts out with a flash of glamor and scenes of Sebastian with the people who work on the estate - whose parents and grand-parents worked there for Sebastian's father and grandfather. A big house at the turn of the 20th century was like a small town with its own carpenter and blacksmith and gardeners and a crowd of indoor servants to take care of the house as well as the people who lived and visited there.

The only non-U visitor at the house is Leonard Anquetil, an explorer who sees Sebastian's life stretching out in meaningless sameness if he doesn't somehow break his attachment to the house. He warns Sebastian but it's too late. The young duke has fallen in love with a married woman, one of his mother's "friends." The fashionable women of his mother's set don't have real friends. The have acquaintances whose personal lives provide the gossip that is the main activity of these women when they aren't buying clothes and planning parties and engaging in love affairs with other people's husbands.

The novel was published in 1930 and so the author knows as she writes about the years from about 1905 to 1910 what lies ahead for Sebastian and the other characters, who believe their world will never change except to add the occasional auto or telephone. But there are hints that things are changing already. The head carpenter at Chevron tells Sebastian, with tears in his eyes, that his son doesn't want to take his place but rather is going to learn to repair cars. The patronistic system with its firm class determinations is nearly over.

I loved this book as did the public when it was published as the author bragged to Virginia Woolf. However, the plot isn't particularly complex and the characters are not very three-dimensional. A good overview of the book can be found at Wikipedia.

2012  No 77

 

Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay

Christopher Benfy could not write a boring book if he tried and he has three previous books to prove it. These are narratives about Emily Dickinson and other figures of her time, eccentrics in Japan during the Gilded Age, and the months Degas spent visiting relatives in New Orleans in 1872-3. All three are at least four-star productions.

Now in Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay he has written a book that is more personal than the others, a thoughtful book in which he talks about his family and how he discovered their stories by accident or by intent. His mother was a Quaker from Cameron, North Carolina, where the sand hills segue into the Piedmont, and where the kaolin is so pure they transported tons of it to England in the 18th century to make high-quality porcelain.

His father escaped to England from Berlin as Hitler was coming to power. His father's family was very wealthy and powerful in pre-war Germany (they owned the largest publishing company in the country) but his aunt and uncle, the Bauhaus artists Josef and Anni Albers, left the country with nothing and made a new life for themselves at Black Mountain College near Asheville in North Carolina. Benfey skillfully ties the many strands of his family together as they intersect.

When I lived in Durham years ago I drove around the country roads of central North Carolina and visited potters working out of a chinked cabin on a home-made wheel. One center of pottery making is Jugtown, NC, where the pot on the right was made. The families there have been making pots since well before the Revolutionary War and their work was breathtakingly simple and beautiful. Benfey meets some of the new generation of potters from that clay-rich area who are making pots that are anchored in that history but moving in new and creative ways.

This is a slow-moving book as it wanders through the author's youth and travels and talks about art and how important it is to all of us, not just the people creating it. He brags about his grandfather, who was a brickmaker and mason. He tells of a short teenage apprenticeship to a pottery-making family in Japan. And he makes his reader slow down and think. The subtitle of the book is, Reflections on Art, Family, & Survival, and it is exactly that.

2012  No 77

Anthony Trollope's Miss Mackenzie

The novel Miss Mackenzie is one of Anthony Trollope's little gems. I say little, though it is 330 pages long, because typically Trollope novels were much longer and were originally published in three volumes, as three-deckers as they called them. It has no subplots; it focuses entirely on Miss Mackenzie. It's also gem-like in that it's highly polished and sparkles.

Margaret Mackenzie is for me one of Trollope's most interesting women. She is 35 as the book opens and has spent her entire life nursing her parents and then nursing her brother, Walter, who took her in after their deaths. She has lovely hair but she is not at all pretty. She has had no social life and although a young clerk from Walter's office courted her briefly 10 years earlier her brother forbade the romance. She has never been to a dinner party or a tea party, she has no friends, and she has no experience with men.

Now a middle-aged spinster (remember this is 1865), Miss Mackenzie has unexpectedly inherited her brother's fortune and finds herself free of obligations and prosperous but alone with no idea what to do with her life. How does she go about meeting people? What can she do to make herself useful? Where should she live? And does she have a hope of marrying, which she would like to do if she could find the right man? Or rather if the right man could find her as she is not, in that era, allowed to do any active looking herself.

She chooses to move from London to the town of Littlebath (by which the author means Bath), to take one of her nieces to live with her and educate, and to become part of the social circle of a popular evangelical clergyman and his Mrs Proudie-like wife. Now Trollope did not like evangelicals; low-church was in his mind connected with closed-mindedness, with hypocritical men and prune-faced women. No cards, no Sunday mail delivery, three services on "the Sabbath," and heaven knows no dancing. Miss Mackenzie, now living in Bath where cards and parties and laughter are a great draw for most people, finds that by adhering to this religious group she has drawn a tight circle around herself, limiting severely what she can do and whom she can associate with.

This is mistake #1 and the second is like unto it: Miss Mackenzie is courted by yet another evangelical clergyman, Mr Maguire, whose ooze is obvious to the reader but not to the inexperienced Miss Mackenzie. He suffers from a "squint" - what we would now call strabismus - but is otherwise quite handsome. He is of course interested only in her money, but she does not understand his mercenary motives and is tempted into at least thinking about marriage with him. One of the many things about him that I dislike is that he takes the liberty of calling her Margaret. Even the author does not call her by her first name and in the mid-19th century this was an enormous intrusion.

She has another suitor, Mr Rubb, whose primary problem is that He Is Not a Gentleman. He is the son of the business partner of her other brother, Tom. Tom has invested his money in oilcloth manufacturing, which might have been marginally ok, but Rubb and Mackenzie have a shop, a storefront. And no one in trade can be considered a gentleman. Mr Rubb starts out by talking Miss Mackenzie out of some of her money, which she invests without interest in the oilcloth company. But he is not bad looking, has a good deal of charm, is fundamentally honest, and he truly loves her. She allows herself to think of Mr Rubb in terms of a husband despite her embarrassment when she is with him in company.

What the modern reader has to understand and accept, at least within the frame of this novel, is that it is not appropriate to be a democrat. Class is important to Trollope as it was important to most people in 1865 England. To associate with those who are of a lower class is not commendable. To marry Mr Rubb would be to marry beneath her and Miss Mackenzie would no longer be welcome, for example, in her evangelical circle, who, whatever their faults, are ladies and gentlemen.

Miss Mackenzie has another suitor, her cousin John Ball, who is about 10 years older than she and is plump and has nine children. He is living with his parents in distressed circumstances and is a gloomy man, thinking continually about the money that his uncle left to Miss Mackenzie's brothers Tom and Walter, money that he thinks should have been left to him. He would like to marry Miss Mackenzie to get her half of the money and his mother strongly eggs him on in this endeavor. Lady Ball is a harridan, a termagant of the first water. Many of Trollope's old ladies are mean and overbearing but Lady Ball is evil. She and Mr Maguire cause a great deal of trouble for Miss Mackenzie.

Miss Mackenzie likes her cousin very much and he her, and as an indication of how much she admires and respects him they are soon on first name terms. This is acceptable because they are cousins and because Miss Mackenzie is pleased to allow it. She asks John Ball for advice about what she should do with the money that she knows he considers his own because he is so honest - she trusts him entirely. He, too, asks her to marry him but Miss Mackenzie may be 35 and beyond first youth but she still yearns for a bit of romance, to be really loved by a man with a bit of dash. Once again she is tempted, however, until his mother urges her to marry him because she would eventually become Lady Ball and would have a carriage. Miss Mackenzie is so insulted by these supposed enticements that she says no.

This situation is in place with Miss Mackenzie waffling between her suitors when her brother Tom becomes fatally ill and it is discovered that he will leave his family with almost nothing to live on. Miss Mackenzie hurries to London to help nurse him and decides she must give half her money to his widow and her many children. But when she visits her lawyer, Mr Slow, of the firm of Slow and Bideawhile, she is in for a shock that changes everything in her life and her relationship to all three suitors.

2012  No 76

Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death

Set in the early 50s, this first of a new series of cozy mysteries by James Runcie features the vicar of a lovely old church in lovely old Grantchester, a town near Cambridge. The Reverend Mr Sidney Chambers is charming, single and susceptible, low key and laid back but curious and persevering, always willing to at least try to help people. In his early 30s and ordained since the war, he is a minor canon at Ely Cathedral and friends with a local inspector with whom he plays backgammon every Thursday night at a pub in the university city. All of these characteristics (including his weekly meeting with a member of the local constabulary) contribute to his success in solving the short puzzles in this collection of stories.

 The first story is perhaps the best. A local citizen has killed himself but after the burial service Sidney is approached by the man's mistress saying she thinks he was murdered. There isn't much in the way of evidence but Sidney asks some questions of the man's business partner, their secretary, and the widow, a lovely German woman to whom Sidney is strangely attracted. His friend, Inspector Keating, is unconvinced this is anything but what it seems to be and warns Sidney off, but the more questions he asks and the more pieces of the puzzle he puts together the more likely it seems that this is not your run-of-the-mill drunken suicide. A bottle of Scotch plays an important role in this story. I always like to see a single malt get the credit it deserves.

Other mysteries Sidney tackles include a jewelry theft, the mysterious death of a nightclub owner, suspected euthanasia, and a mysteriously substituted painting of great but hitherto unacknowledged value. The art theft story, the last in the book and longer than most of the others, is well plotted and features an art historian who is a delight and with whom the reader hopes Sidney will eventually become more than just friends. She gives him a Labrador puppy which he does not want but which soon becomes a loved companion and I see that as a good sign for the future.

My blogger friend Elaine at Random Jottings first mentioned this book and it lives up to her billing. My copy of the book has a discreet little " 1 " on the spine which I take as a sign that there will be before long another with a " 2 ".

2012  No 75

Midnight in Peking

China, 1937. In Peking it was a time fraught with expectation, most of it bad. The Japanese had overrun the north of China and were now circling the city. They had carried out their three Alls (Kill all, Destroy all, Burn all - a scorched earth policy) and for a hundred miles in every direction the land was useless burned waste. Refugees from this formerly rich agricultural area were flocking to the impossibly crowded city and the Japanese themselves were infiltrating, recruiting collaborators and bringing in large quantities of opium and heroin, making them very cheap and increasing enormously the number of drug addicts.

In anticipation of the Japanese attack, which finally came in midsummer (the Rape of Nanking occurred the following December), most of the westerners in the city were leaving for Tientsin, Shanghai, or their summer homes in Peiteiho. But the European Jews who had come to China fleeing Hitler, the White Russians who had fled the Bolsheviks, and the criminals who had fled everyone, had no papers, no money, no future, no hope, nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, the remaining non-Chinese with any money spent their time drinking too much, reading month-old newspapers, dancing to music popular years earlier in New York and Paris, wearing 1935 fashions, and in the case of the British, still in January of 1937 awaiting a photo of the new King George VI to hang on the wall of the club.

It was in this city, this atmosphere, that the body of a young English girl was found on the morning of 8 January 1937 by a Chinese man out walking his songbird. She had been dumped at the foot of the 15th century Fox Tower, part of the Tartar Wall and the route the girl normally took returning home from the hotels, clubs, ice rink, and other amenities in the western Legation Quarter. Pamela Warner lived in a courtyard home on Armour Factory Alley in the Papermakers Quarter with her father, who was in his 70s and an Old China Hand who first came to the country in the 1880s.

Because the girl's body was found in the Chinese part of the city, Detective Colonel Han Shih-ching was in charge of the investigation. An ex-Scotland Yard detective, DCI Richard Dennis was sent from Tientsin to assist him. The two detectives got along well and went about their work in a logical and thorough manner. They interviewed her father, the family servants, the girls she spent her time with, some boyfriends, the headmaster of the school she attended, and many others who might know something about the crime.

They uncovered some surprising scandals. Many people in the China at the time had pasts they were not talking about. But the officials came up with very little about what happened on the night of 7 January and after the usual 20 days that a Chinese detective was given in 1937 to solve a murder, the inquest left the case open and the police went back to their routine.

But her father was unsatisfied and undertook his own investigation, sending out fliers in Mandarin, employing Chinese detectives, and uncovering some shocking discrepancies in the evidence Han and Dennis gathered and the dismaying truth about the crime and about the underworld of both European and Chinese Peking of 1937. He wrote repeatedly to the British officials in Peking and London with the results of his investigation, but was repeatedly brushed off. It is from those documents, along with newspaper reports, which have been sitting in dusty files in government archives and libraries, that the author has been able to piece together the real story of Pamela Werner's death.

I have a friend who lived in China in those turbulent times which made this all the more interesting to me. But the story is tightly written, is evocative of the crumbling world that was Peking in those pre-war years, and is a true crime story to rival the best murder mysteries of the time.

2012  No 74

 

Hit Lit

James W Hall teaches a course in best sellers at Florida International University. What makes a book soar? Why do people find these particular books so appealing? What do they have in common?

After analyzing the top sellers of the 20th century, in this book, Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Best Sellers, Hall is able to make some generalizations, examining the setting, characters, plot, themes, and emotional climate in the novels that made it to the top.

I would like to have had a chance to take this course with Hall. He is an author of fiction of some repute, having written many novels including a popular series starring a loner called Thorn. (The first book in that series is Under Cover of Daylight, 1986) Hall has won both an Edgar and a Shamus award. He knows whereof he speaks.

He uses the following books to illustrate his observations about what makes a best seller:

• Gone with the Wind
• Peyton Place
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Valley of the Dolls
• The Godfather
• The Exorcist
• Jaws
• The Dead Zone
• The Hunt for Red October
• The Firm

Gone with the Wind, for example, has a sweeping historical setting, something readers apparently like a lot. Peyton Place was drenched with sex at a time (1956) when that was unusual in a popular novel. Some of these novels deal with contentious topics like race (To Kill a Mockingbird), organized crime (The Godfather), or religion (The Exorcist.) Some provide edge-of-the-seat suspense (Jaws.)

After reading this book you will be able to sit down and write your own best seller. This is not a how-to book. There is always something ineffable about the novels that make it to the top of the best-seller lists and that requires talent. But this is entertaining reading and I found it engrossing.

2012  No 73

Cambridge Blue

Alison Bruce's 2009 start to her Gary Goodhew series is an excellent mystery. It has the inimitable Cambridge (England) setting, a series of deaths spread widely apart, a puzzler of a plot, and some complex characters, including the detective himself and his loving but somewhat crusty grandmother.

Goodhew is a young detective constable, having made his way up the ladder unusually quickly, and with an unusual knack for figuring out without a lot of evidence what's going on and who is doing what to whom. He can't always get his boss or the detectives he's working with to follow his hunches, so as the book begins he has restorted to leaving anonymous tips on his boss' desk. The boss suspects it's his doing and doesn't like it at all, though he does like it that this enables him to solve otherwise puzzling murders.

The book opens with the attack of a woman as she walks her dog on a river-side path, one of those thriller teasers that are a popular way to lure the reader into the book. I usually don't like that all too obvious technique but this vignette is well done and it fits in nicely with the main plot as Goodhew tries to figure out the dynamics of the family in the middle of the investigation. Unfortunately the woman who looks most guilty is the one he most hopes is innocent.

The book has many of the things that help liven up a mystery: another detective who is definitely not on Goodhew's side, a boss who is trying to hold him back (though in a good way), not one but two secret diaries, and two important murders from the past that have a good deal to do with the murders that Goodhew is trying to solve in the present.

2012  No 72

Conan Doyle, more than just Sherlock Holmes

From about 1980 until 2005 when I left the Washington, DC, area, one man more or less controlled my reading. For much of that time Michael Dirda wrote a chatty book column in the Washington Post's book review section and so skilled is he at describing books in must-read terms ("lip-smacking narrative gusto," "rumbustious," "one of the world's masterpieces") that just about every week I put on reserve at the library or bought at least one of the books he mentioned in his column. When his books began to be published it was all over with me and my TBR list.

I knew Dirda was a Sherlock Holmes afficianado but until this new book, On Conan Doyle, came my way a couple of days ago I didn't realize quite how deep into that world he was embedded. He is an invested member of the Baker Street Irregulars, and because that makes him eligible, also a member of the Half-Pay Club of DC. Like so many of us he discovered Sherlock Holmes in his early youth (he was 10, I was 14) and he strings his comments on his growing interest in the author over the years. He discusses Holmes, the many other books Conan Doyle wrote, and eventually the companionship of the BSI.

As is well known, Conan Doyle considered his Sherlock Holmes stories ephemera and put his heart into The White Company, his nonfiction, and the many other genres in which he wrote. Dirda has read them all and finds these other books worthy, most of them, and since this is a book about the author and not the character, he describes the joy he took in reading many of these other books and encourages the reader to try them.

Dirda particularly recommends two novels about a Napoleonic soldier, The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896) and The Adventures of Gerard (1903.) He quotes George MacDonald Fraser: "a splendid catalog of secret missions, escapes, love affairs, duels, disguises, pursuits, triumphs, and occasional disasters," and adds that they "clearly helped inspire Fraser's own brilliant historical novels about Harry Flashman, but unlike that irrepressible Victorian cad and coward, Etienne Gerard is one of the most endearing and honorable figures in all of literature."

In a chapter called "Steel True, Blade Straight," which is carved on Conan Doyle tombstone, Dirda describes the author's passion for honor, justice, and common sense. Conan Doyle "attacks journalistic improprieties, proudly serves as the president of the Divorce Law Reform Union, argues for the adoption of body armor for soldiers, warns against the imminent threat of submarine warfare, advocates life-preserving 'neck-collars' for sailors, envisions the benefits of a Channel tunnel, and promotes the cause of Spiritualism." Dirda finds his science fiction well worth reading as well as his historical novels.

Conan Doyle was of the stoic school: "That is one of the weaknesses of modern life. We complain too much. We are not ashamed of complaining." He met and admired Oscar Wilde and was amused by his brother-in-law, E V Hornung, the creator of Raffles, the gentleman-thief. He almost named his famous character Sherringford Hope and his companion Ormond Sacker.

Some other tidbits from the book: Nero Wolfe is thought by some to be the son of Irene Adler and Myroft Holmes, Sherlock's brother, who is also thought by some to have been the original M of British intelligence. He points out that T S Eliot stole almost entire the Musgrave Ritual Q&A for "Murder in the Cathedral": "Who shall have it?" "He who will come," etc, and he modeled Macavity, the Mystery Cat," aka The Hidden Paw, after Professor Moriarty.

There is much, much more in this little book, and I encourage you to mine the rest of the gems yourself.

2012  No 71

It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, . . .

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"The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination." (Elizabeth Hardwick)

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The Long Ships

In his introduction to Frans G Bengtsson's The Long ShipsMichael Chabon has this to say about the novel:

In my career as a reader I have encountered only three people who knew The Long Ships, and all three of them, like me, loved it immoderately. Four for four: from this tiny but irrefutable sample I dare to extrapolate that this novel, first published in Sweden during the Second World War, stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth.

Let me make that five out of five. I am immoderately excited about this novel, a story in a genre that I never, ever read - slam, bang adventure, war, sea stories taking place in the 9th century. But this tale about a red-haired Dane called Orm, who accidentally goes off on an adventure with a ship full of Vikings and comes home a hero is irresistible.

Red Orm is kidnapped and becomes one of the adventurers in an open boat that heads for the south coast of England to rape and pillage. They pick up a slave from some other adventures who don't want him because he won't eat pork and refuses to row on Saturdays. He turns out to be a Jew from Spain, which had not too long before been conquered by the Moors. He is a wealthy goldsmith, who directs them to Cordova, where they are themselves enslaved by the caliph.

Orm is a sensitive lad, at least by Viking terms, and a bit of a hypochondriac. He gets nervous when the slave next to him on the rowing bench has a cough. There is an adventure a minute in this book and before you know it Orm and his friends have stolen a bell from Santiago de Compostella, summered with some monks in County Cork, and offered the bell as a gift to King Harald Bluetooth.

There are other adventures, sword fights, a bit of wooing, and a trip to the Black Sea, all moving along at a brisk clip. The book is surprisingly entertaining in many ways, not least of which is the dry, understated wit of the author as he regards the world the Danes look on as normal and we look on with horror. His religious characters are a delight, especially the poor monks who are trying to convert these warriers to Christianity while they continue to attribute their luck or lack of it to the old gods.

This book stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to almost any reader. It has done so for me.

2012  No 70

 

The book Georgette Heyer didn't want you to read

In her 20s and still finding her way to a comfortable style, Georgette Heyer wrote four books set in the 20th century that she later asked her publishers to repress. They were allowed to go out of print and have never been republished except now by print-on-demand.

One of the reasons she didn't want these books available to the public is their semi-autobiographical quality and the most intensely personal of these books is Helen, published in 1928. It is the story of a girl orphaned at birth who is brought up by her father. The bond between them is intense but both are unusually self-contained and do not tolerate the expression of strong feeling. They do not engage either in small talk or the normal hypocracy that smooths life for most of us. The girl and her father are very happy at their country estate, riding their beloved horses, and with loving friends and neighbors and much intellectual conversation. Lots of books.

The first half of this book is superb, five stars by almost any criteria, with insight into the characters and a steadily clicking plot as Helen learns from an unusually clever governess as she reaches her teenage years. Then comes the Great War when Helen loses her beloved horses, then her father - he enlists and is sent to a headquarters job in France. He is "perfectly safe" behind the lines, but of course no one is perfectly safe in war and this is a parting that is difficult for Helen to accept. She signs up with a neighbor to nurse wounded soldiers in London.

Helen had a handful of suitors in the pre-war years but she was uniniterested in professions of love and proposals of marriage. She was friends with a few of them, young men whom she loved but was not in love with, and it was another wrench when they went off to war. My favorite of these suitors was killed in the war as were other characters who were close to Helen and her father.

After the war Helen is caught up in the roaring 20s, makeup, short skirts, drinking (legal in England), partying until dawn. She hung out with, but did not become part of, the Bohemian set, witty people who were examining every aspect of traditional life as they tried to recover from the war.

It is this post-war part of the story that is, if not actually weak, certainly not as strong as the first part of the novel. Helen begins to fall for a man who has had many affairs and who considers himself not immoral but amoral, but Helen's character is so well-formed it is difficult for the reader to believe she is serious about him. The last few pages on the other hand, in which there is a catastrophy that shakes Helen to the core, is very well-written and I found it realistic and very bittersweet.

Helen is hard to find and expensive but I believe it's important. Because it is so very auto-biographical it strongly suggests Georgette Heyer's character and explains her relationship with her beloved father.

2012  No 69

Earth Day Reading

On the first Earth Day in 1970 I was at a teach-in in Morristown, New Jersey, covering the story for the newspaper I worked for, the Passaic Herald News. I was bored and I was convinced despite the speakers' optimistic predictions that this was going to be an annual event and grow into a national movement that they were wrong.

Turns out it was I who was wrong and more than 30 years later EarthDay is still going strong, has in fact has become a kind of secular holy day, celebrated in various ways around the world in a sort of nature worship.

Every Sunday the Library of America, the people who are publishing definitive editions of so many US authors, sends me an email, The Story of the Week. Most are fiction and mostly I ignore them. But today, in celebration of Earth Day, they have sent me a story by the famed New Yorker columnist, Berton Roueche, author of "The Annals of Medicine." His pieces have become the plots of many House episodes.

 Today they sent me "The Fog," a story published in the New Yorker in 1950 about deadly pollution in 1948 in Donora, Pennsylvania. Here's now it starts:

The fog closed over Donora on the morning of Tuesday, October 26th. The weather was raw, cloudy, and dead calm, and it stayed that way as the fog piled up all that day and the next. By Thursday, it had stiffened adhesively into a motionless clot of smoke. That afternoon, it was just possible to see across the street, and, except for the stacks, the mills had vanished. The air began to have a sickening smell, almost a taste. It was the bittersweet reek of sulphur dioxide. Everyone who was out that day remarked on it, but no one was much concerned. The smell of sulphur dioxide, a scratchy gas given off by burning coal and melting ore, is a normal concomitant of any durable fog in Donora. This time, it merely seemed more penetrating than usual.

At about eight-thirty on Friday morning, one of Donora’s eight physicians, Dr. Ralph W. Koehler, a tense, stocky man of forty-eight, stepped to his bathroom window for a look at the weather. It was, at best, unchanged. He could see nothing but a watery waste of rooftops islanded in fog. As he was turning away, a shimmer of movement in the distance caught his eye. . . .

You can read the entire story here. It comes from the Library of America anthology, American Earth.

China in 10 Words by Yu Hua

As I read China in 10 Words, I wondered how Yu Hua managed to stay out of trouble with the authorities in his native China. It turns out he has not entirely escaped their notice and his novel, This Life, was originally banned as is the movie made from the book.

But as I slowly read these essays and thought about them I realized the criticism of the Chinese government and the description of the nation''s almost total lack of what we would call ethics in many aspects of life is secondary. The book is really about people, in this case Chinese people, engaging in what looks like Capitalism but is more like a wild west shootout in the globalized manufacturing world. "Copycat" is an attempt to explain the Chinese reaction to foreign copyright and patents (worthless) and "Bamboozle" describes the apparently universal need to lie, cheat, and steal as a sort of national game.

Many famous high-end companies manufacturer their clothing and purses and such in China. The Chinese produce many more than the company requires and sell them at much lower prices as "the real thing." Who is to say that an item manufactured in the same facility by the same people using the same patterns and materials is not "real." Copyright is another significant problem. There are 11 more Harry Potter books for sale in China than there are in Britain.

Throughout the essays Yu weaves his life as a child of the Cultural Revolution and his observations not just about the country's economy but what might be called the sociology of a fast-changing country with its poverty and opression mixed in with the recent hyper-economy. He points out that the Communists tried to wipe out the historic religions and have replaced them with nothing that would guide people in their search for ideals and guides for their lives.

The ten words are "people," "leader," "reading," "writing," "Lu Xun," "disparity," "revolution," "grassroots," "copycat," and "bamboozle."

2011  No 204

A new Georgette Heyer biography

The more I learn about Georgette Heyer the more interesting she becomes. Jennifer Kloester's new biography is filled with anecdotes and quote from her many letters over the years to friends, family members, and her long-suffering editors and agents. She was as witty and amusing in her letters as she is in her books.

Born in 1902, Heyer was the daughter of a well-educated man with progressive ideas about education. He taught her at home and sent her for a time to school and between these two she got a really fine education in history and languages. He was a French teacher at King's College School until the school asked him to do some fund raising for them. He was very successful at this and met a great many people of importance, some of whom he introudced to Georgette. She had an unusual childhood and an unusually tight link with her father.

Her father's job took him to France and the family lived in Paris in 1913. They left quickly when the war broke out in 1914, but while she was there Georgette had the time of her life. In one of her early books set in the 20th century she describes a trip to the city and the joy her character, based closedly on Georgette herself, took in walking everywhere, driving to Fontainbleu or Versailles, and deciding which of the boulevards radiating from the Place d'Etoile gave the best view of the Art de Triumph.

The Black Moth was Georgette Heyer's first historical romance, written to amuse her brother, Boris, when he was ill. She was only 19 when the book was published and it was such a hit she immediately began writing at least one novel a year for most of the rest of her life. Her books were not just Regency romances, although those are the ones that she is most famous for. She also wrote a series of murder mysteries, four books set in the 20th century that she later repressed, probably because they were too revealing for this very reserved and somewhat shy woman. She also wrote about the medieval period and the Georgian as well as the years 1811-1820.

Jennifer Kloester was fortunate in having available to her not only the notes from Jane Aiken Hodge's earlier biography but many letters from the collections of family and friends and the cooperation of Heyer's son and his wife. Her doctoral dissertation was eventually turned into her book, Georgette Heyer's Regency World. The author is interviewed here and here on the Word Wenches blog. Elaine at Random Jottings, who has met the author, posted about this book here.

 2012  No 68

Jewels by Victoria Finlay

Jewels by Victoria Finlay seemed like the perfect book for my friend Isabella's birthday so I ordered it from Amazon. When it came on a Wednesday afternoon I sat down to look at the photos. By Saturday morningI had finished reading it. I didn't mean to do it. I couldn't help myself.

Gemstones engage us on a few different levels. They are pretty to look at of course, and there is something attractive about their rarity (although some of them aren't that rare, as it turns out.) And over the years, since history began, stories have accrued around them, growing like an emerald crystal.

Finlay, the author of Colour: Travels through the Paintbox, which dovegreyreader has been reading, has put a great deal of research and travel into this book about gems and it has paid off. She has spent hours in museums and bazaars, crawled into ancient Egyptian and still operating mines, talked to people from a Scottish pearl fisher to a retired diamond cutter, and interviewed a man whose father devised a way to create man-made jewel-quality emeralds. Synthetic diamonds (including those made from a loved one's ashes if you are interested) and rubies are now quite large and almost impossible to tell from the real thing.

The organization of the book is clever. Finlay uses the Moh scale of hardness (talc to diamond) to arrange her chapters, starting with amber, which is very soft and light (it floats.) She has some bad news for us there. The famous amber room was taken by the Germans from St Petersburg during World War Two and was almost surely burned (and melted) at the end of the war.

Next comes one of my favorite chapters, about Whitby jet. It is this small English town from which came the jet jewelry so popular with Queen Victoria and the rest of mourning-obsessed 19th century English ladies. Finlay attends an underground church in the opal mining town Coober Pedy where there is an entire city underground. She visits the American Indian reservation where most of the world's periots are found.

Her trip to Burma to learn about rubies includes an overview of the violent military dictatorship there and her visit to Sri Lanka (Marco Polo got their first) to look for the origins of her family's sapphire are amusing and intriguing. She got to try her hand at cutting a "sapphire" (actually quartz.)

Finlay talks about pearls but that chapter was not as complete as the others (or perhaps I just know too much about pearls) and I got a bit tired with her repeated cries of anguish for the poor oysters who suffer from having small beads embedded in their gonads in pearl farms. She discusses blood diamonds (now called by jewelers, less-alarmingly, conflict diamonds) and the death and misery they have brought to people in many of the African countries where diamonds are mined. She puzzles at the continued popularity of diamonds despite this injustice and the fact that the stones are not rare but rather are made to seem rare because they are controlled by the De Beers cartel.

The book sent me scurrying to look up images on Google of sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and the collection of jewels in the Topkapi Museum (there is a jeweled dagger with some whopping great emeralds in the handle that I rather fancy.) I can't wait to find out what Finlay will be writing about next.

2012  No 67

Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare

I've always loved the stage direction from A Winter's Tale,"Exit, pursued by a bear," even though the character exiting under duress does get eaten by his pursuer. But one of the many grisly entrances and exits in Titus Andronicus has become my new favorite: Enter carrying two heads and a hand.

I asked Wilhelm what he knew about Titus Andronicus and all he could think of was, "Seldom performed." I can see why. The bloodshed is almost unending and includes the cutting off of both hands and cutting out the tongue of Titus' daughter. Not to mention all the deaths.

Titus is not a historical character. He is a fictitious general who arrives back in Rome after a 10-year war and a great victory in which 21 of his sons were killed, leaving I think three alive. He brings, as conquering heroes did in those days, the captive Gothic queen, Tamora, and her son, Alarbus. Also her lover, Aaron, though I don't suppose that is as traditional.

The Roman emperor has died. We don't know which one and since this is all fiction it doesn't matter. But what does matter is who will succeed him. The crowd wants Titus but the old man says no and asks them instead to let him choose the next ruler. He chooses the bad guy, the elder son, Saturninus (he should have known better just by the guy's name.) The new emperor asks Titus for his daughter, Lavinia, in marriage and Titus says yes, not realizing she is already engaged to be married to the brother of Saturninus, Bassianus, the one he should have chosen to rule Rome (except that if he had there would be no play.)

Titus' remaining sons help her fiance run off with her and the new emperor gets mad and marries the Gothic queen instead. And then the fun begins.

Here's an casualty list:

1. the dead bodyof one of Tisus' sons,
2. the sacrifice of Tamora's son,
3. the stabbing of Mutius by his father, Titus
4. the stabbing of Bassianus by Tamor's sons
5. the rape and mutilation of Lavinia
6. the mutilation of Titus
7. the execution of Martius and
8. Quintus,
9. the stabbling of a nurse
10. the hanging of a clown
11. the throat-cutting of Chiron and
12. Demetrius
13. the unwitting cannivalism of Tamora
14. the stabbing of Lavinia
15. the stabbing of Tamora
16. the stabbing of Titus
17. the stabbing of Saturninus, and finally
18. the projected death by slow starvation of Aaron. 

I can't recommend this play to anyone except perhaps a student of Senecan tragedy, of which it is a parody I think. I've been under the mistaken assumption that I had read all of Shakespeare but I had not read this and now I know why.

2012  No 66

Death in the City of Light -- a serial killer stalks Paris during WW II

Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris by David King is a gruesome story of a man who took advantage of people who wanted or needed to get out of Paris during World War Two. Here is what PW said about the book:

In 1944, when Parisian police entered a mansion littered with dismembered, rotting bodies, they thought of the Gestapo, but it turned out to be a purely French affair. Historian King (Vienna 1914) has mined the resulting global media circus (not only in France; Time magazine covered it) and extensive official records to tell a gripping story. The villain was a textbook psychopath, Dr. Marcel Petiot: a charming but heartless liar. Despite spending 20 years in and out of police courts, he won elections to local offices in the provinces only to be dismissed for petty crimes. Moving to Paris, he sold narcotics to addicts under the guise of treatment. During the German occupation, he offered to smuggle people out of France, murdering them when they arrived for the journey carrying their valuables. He went to the guillotine proclaiming himself (despite overwhelming evidence) a resistance hero, who killed only Nazis and collaborators. This fascinating, often painful account combines a police procedural with a vivid historical portrait of culture and law enforcement in Nazi-occupied France.

One of the interesting characters in this book is the policeman who investigated the serial murders, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu. He was charged at the end of the war as so many innocent people were with collaboration but after a short time was totally exonerated. He is believed to be one of the originals for Georges Simenon's Maigret.

2011  No 203

A Patriot After All, 1940-1941 by George Orwell

Time ran out on George Orwell's A Patriot After All, 1940-1941, Volume 12 in the 20-volume complete works edited by Peter Davison. I borrowed it on Interlibrary Loan (ILL) from the Spokane Public Library (who got it from South Dakota State University) and I still had about 200 pages to read when the book was due. A heartfelt plea to the circulation librarian to let me keep it for a few more days went unrewarded.

 But Wilhelm pointed out that it might be time for a break. I had been grousing for two weeks about Orwell and his ridiculous, wish-fulfilment predictions about how World War Two would turn out (there must be a revolution in England for us to win the war, everyone in England but the "working man" is in favor of capitulation to the Nazis, etc.) Add to that the problem that in a volume of truly complete works one reads the same ideas and sometimes the very same words over and over in journals, letters, essays, and books and you get exasperation with a soupson of boredom.

I was very interested and not the least bit weary of reading Orwell's personal journal, which was mainly about what fence he repaired on his little farm, what he planted, what in his garden had made it over the winter (not much), how many eggs his hens were laying, and how much he was selling his eggs for (3 shillings 6 pence for a score in the fall of 1940.) It was when I got to the third iteration of his lectures to the Home Guard on how to secure an urban street, build a barricade (use a lot of sand bags), and otherwise train for a Nazi invasion that boredom began to take over.

The title comes from, I think, a letter in which he talks about how he had long been a pacifist but when the war broke out he realized he was a patriot after all. Orwell's prose is always exceedingly clear and his book, movie, and drama reviews are superb whether you agree with them or not. I should not be complaining about having to read Orwell. So I'll take a little break here before I tackle the next book. And although I didn't finish this one, I'm going to count it as "read." I'll borrow it again on ILL one day and finish it.

2012  No 65