Author: whatmeread

Best Book of the Week!

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Cover for Sweet ToothThis week’s Best Book is Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan.

Hi, all, I realized last week that if I continued reviewing books at this pace, I would soon run out of my backlog of notes about books I’ve already read. (No, I do not read this many books a week!) If I catch up, then I won’t be able to post reviews except as I finish books, which will make my review postings a lot less frequent. I am trying to post as often as possible. So, starting today, my Best Book post is going to count as my daily post intead of being supplementary to a review. I will not number it, though, because I count my “week” as every five reviews.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Day 385: Sweet Tooth

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Cover for Sweet ToothBest Book of the Week!

I’m always suspicious of book blurbs that compare one writer’s books to another’s. On the cover of Sweet Tooth, a blurb says “Jane Austen meets John Le Carré meets John Barth.” To my shame, I can say nothing about John Barth (except that I attempted once without success to read The Sot-Weed Factor), but Sweet Tooth has nothing to do with Austen except that she is mentioned in it and has only a few similarities with Le Carré but none of the extreme tension. Generally speaking, I don’t really believe that the work of one writer is like that of another, and certainly no one is like Ian McEwan.

Serena Frome is a smart, beautiful young graduate from Cambridge in the early 1970’s when she takes a job as a very minor employee of MI5. She has been groomed for this position by her much older mentor and lover, Tony Canning, a don. She is a naive young woman from a relatively privileged background who loves literature in a fairly superficial way (speed reading through stacks of novels) but has been pushed into mathematics because her mother wants her to accomplish something “important.” Unfortunately, she finds her facility at mathematics to be superficial too, unequal to the level of her classmates, and only earns a third. Her only distinction at school is some breezy articles written for a student magazine about what she is reading, and they lose their audience as soon as she writes more seriously about political issues.

Really, her mother seems much more eager for her to accomplish something than she is. She is somewhat shallow and eager to please, more interested in her relationships with men than in a career. She also has a tendency to pretend she knows about things that she doesn’t.

After carrying on a fairly innocent flirtation with a coworker, Max Greatorix, and having him break it off, Serena gets her big break at work. MI5 is setting up an operation called Sweet Tooth, the intention of which is to quietly fund young writers who have political beliefs sympathetic with those of the government in a subtle propaganda war against communism. Serena is told that the money will simply give the chosen writers more freedom to work, and the operation will not interfere in any way with their work.

Serena, with her voluminous reading habits but flimsy background of the series of articles she wrote in college, is asked to pronounce on the work of Tom Haley. She loves his stories and is soon given the job of recruiting him, the only fiction writer in the operation. The project seems to go swimmingly, although Tom is soon writing about themes the government would not approve. But Serena tells herself that they were not to influence Tom’s work, and anyway she is having an affair with him.

Their relationship is born in deceit, though, since Tom has no idea that his grant is coming from MI5 or that Serena is his handler. As their affair grows more serious, Serena struggles with when to tell him. Soon something else is going on that Serena doesn’t understand. As with any good spy story, you don’t always know who is lying to whom.

Since this is McEwan, we know the story will not be straightforward, and again he presents us with a great example of an unreliable narrator and a foray into metafiction. We also get a light evocation of England during a difficult period of miners’ strikes, economic and political instability, IRA bombings, and the dawning hippy and drug cultures. Although by no means a Cold War spy thriller, the novel provides plenty of plot twists.

Day 384: Vendetta

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Cover for VendettaAurelio Zen is faced with a seemingly insoluble mystery in Vendetta, and the hapless detective falls into the solution, this time literally. Some government ministry officials assign him to the murder of an eccentric billionaire, Oscar Burolo, whose corrupt dealings have made many Italian politicians wealthy. The chief suspect is a friend of one of the politicians. They want Zen to find a murderer–just about anyone except the suspect will do–and if he has to frame someone, that’s fine, too.

The problem is that Burolo was killed on his seemingly impregnable estate in Sardinia, where every room is monitored by video. Burolo’s death is plainly visible on the cameras, but not his murderer.

Before Zen leaves for Sardinia, though, some odd things happen. He thinks someone may have been following him, and someone has been in his house. A criminal he put away has just been released from jail, and a magistrate has been slain, but he sees no connection between these two incidents. It takes awhile, but Zen figures out that someone is stalking him. His growing relationship with his coworker Tania is also complicated by his being forced to go out of town.

On the scene of the crime, Zen finds an odd care-taking couple and learns that the chief suspect was probably not the murderer. Everyone that was on the scene was killed with a shotgun, and no one else appears to have been in that part of the house. Yet, the estate’s safeguards make it next to impossible for someone to have sneaked in from the outside, it appears.

In his bumbling way, Zen remains incorruptible while managing to stumble into a solution of the crime that makes everyone happy. Dibdin’s mysteries always cynically expose corruption in the Italian government. Zen is a somewhat befuddled detective, nattily dressed, and Dibdin takes great pleasure in occasionally covering his impeccable detective with muck. Vendetta is no exception. Zen’s romances and his difficult relationship with his nearly senile mother are important components of the series, which is occasionally funny and furnishes a clever puzzle to work out.

Day 383: The Hamlet

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Cover for The HamletWhen I got into The Hamlet a bit, I realized that a bastardized version of it had been released as a movie years ago called The Long, Hot Summer. But Paul Newman’s charming rascal is not at all the same animal as his original, Flem Snopes, a despicable man who rises in life using chicanery, cheating, and blackmail to wrest what he can from the poorest of the poor.

The Hamlet is part of a trilogy of novels about the history of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, beginning shortly after Reconstruction. In particular, it is about the rise of Snopes, the son of an impoverished sharecropper. It begins when Jody Varner, the son of Frenchman’s Bend’s most powerful citizen, Will Varner, leases a property to Snopes’s father Ab, suspected of being a barn-burner. Jody thinks he’ll be able to cheat Snopes out of his yearly crop by alluding to his alleged crimes at the appropriate time. But soon he is more inclined to fear that Snopes will burn him out, so he offers Snopes’s son Flem a job as clerk in the Varner store as insurance.

Soon Jody has lost his own position as manager of the store to Flem Snopes and Snopes has apparently taken over Jody’s standing with his own father. Somehow Snopes begins accruing valuable property and gives away many of the jobs in the village, over which Will Varner has control, to Snopes cousins, whether they are capable of doing them or not. Eventually, he makes a deal to marry Will Varner’s young daughter, the voluptuous Eula.

Life among the Frenchman’s Creek sharecroppers is grim, and the story of the rise of this gray, tight-lipped, cold man is told through a limited third-person narration that moves from person to person. This narrative style creates a sort of plural viewpoint of all the village folk and is combined with the intelligent observations of itinerant sewing-machine salesman V.K. Ratliff, who alertly follows Snopes’s maneuvers and understands all his cheats–or so he thinks.

This novel is created from a series of tales, and it is really about how the tales of an area form its history. It is elegantly written, reflecting a formidable intelligence and education, and is sometimes grimly comic. It comments on the decay of the South in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction, as Frenchman’s Bend is a run-down little village built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. The legend of gold supposedly buried on the grounds of the plantation plays a pivotal part in the story.

Day 382: Touch Not the Cat

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Cover for Touch Not the CatI was surprised by how many people were interested in my review of Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic, so I decided to post a review of another Stewart novel, one of my favorites of her later romantic suspense novels, about family secrets, published in 1976. Touch Not the Cat is the only Stewart book, aside from her Merlin novels, that includes a touch of the supernatural.

Bryony Ashley is awakened on Madeira, where she works, by a message from her father. She has always had a telepathic link with one of her cousins—she doesn’t know which one—but he unexpectedly relays a garbled message from her father. So, she is not altogether surprised when she learns that her father has been severely injured after a hit and run accident. Before she can go to him, he dies, leaving behind a warning of danger. She returns to England to settle his estate.

Bryony’s family owns Ashley Court, an ancient stately home that the family has not been able to afford for some time. It is entailed to her cousin Howard and after him to his sons, her identical twin cousins Emory and James.  Bryony has always assumed that her “lover,” as she calls her telepathic friend, is one of these two cousins, since telepathy is said to run in her family and she was never very close to her third cousin, Francis.

The only part of the estate that passes to Bryony is the small cottage where she lives on a patch of land surrounded by a system of canals. The rest of Ashley Court is currently being rented by a rich American family, the Underhills.

Almost as soon as Bryony gets home, odd things begin happening. Someone steals an old book of records from the church. She goes on the tour of Ashley Court and notices that small, valuable objects of art are missing, including some of her own possessions. Then Emory and James arrive on the scene and immediately begin pressuring her to wind up the estate affairs and sell her own property to them.

As she pokes around in the library, Bryony figures out that her father was worried about something he discovered about the ancient property and is reluctant to sell it until she determines just what his discovery was. Calmly helping around the estate is her childhood friend, Rob Granger. It was to Mrs. Granger and her son that Bryony always turned in times of trouble as a child, so she confides some of her concerns to him.

Interspersed with Bryony’s story are a few paragraphs in each chapter from the point of view of an ancestor, the black sheep of the family, Nick Ashley. It was Nick’s father who selected the puzzling family motto “Touch not the cat, but [without] a glove” (an actual motto of the Clan MacPherson). Eventually, the two stories converge to reveal the secrets of the house and the reason for Bryony’s father’s death.

From a more innocent time, Mary Stewart’s novels are among those I turn to periodically for a bit of light reading, and I find them unfailingly entertaining. As usual with Stewart, her heroine is appealing and she slowly builds a feeling of suspense. Her plotting in this novel is complicated and the mystery engrossing. Although we are accustomed these days to narratives that move back and forth between two periods of time, this was a more unusual technique for the 1970’s.

Day 381: Death on Lindisfarne

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Cover for Death on LindisfarneI got a free copy of this novel in a giveaway from Goodreads. I was attracted to it because of its setting (I can’t resist novels set on islands), and frankly its cover. Unfortunately, however, I found the mystery to be mediocre at best.

Aidan Davison and his eight-year-old daughter Melangell are on a pilgrimage of sorts. Aidan’s wife died about six months ago, and Aidan is taking Melangell to one of the places she loved best, the island of Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast. They are scheduled to attend a course on the history of Lindisfarne given by Reverend Lucy Pargeter.

Lucy is traveling with Peter, a student, and Rachel, a troubled teen who has recently given up drugs. Other attendees are two middle-aged Oxbridge women, a fussy older couple, an evangelist who shows signs of wanting to take over the tour, and his worshipful assistant.

Lindisfarne is a tidal island, which means it can only be accessed by the bridge or across the sands when the tide is out. Aidan and his daughter decide to walk, and on the trek across the sands see on the shore a woman struggling with another person. When they approach the spot, Melangell finds an earring that turns out to belong to Rachel, but they aren’t able to identify her opponent. In any case, Rachel’s subsequent behavior is erratic. Lucy is very concerned about her.

Soon Rachel is found dead, apparently from drowning. The police are inclined to treat the death as a suicide, although the water rescue folks doubt that her body could have drifted to where she was found if she jumped into the water from any height. Soon, though, the autopsy shows she was strangled.

As far as the mystery is concerned, there is a long central section of the book during which no detection is going on, just a lot of speculation. Nothing turns up to point to any of the suspects. In fact, the most suspicious character is involved in an event that could exonerate him. Although it can be frustrating to read a mystery where evidence or suspicion arbitrarily seems to point to everyone, it is even more frustrating to have no evidence at all. When the definitive clue finally arrives, the main characters stupidly miss it, even though it makes the motive and the culprit immediately obvious.

More troublesome, though, is that the entire murder depends on Rachel not telling Lucy something that I couldn’t imagine not being said almost right away. Yes, one sentence at the logical time would have either prevented the murder or made the solution obvious.

But these are problems that only become obvious once the case is solved. Characterization and behavior are problems from the start. The novel is only adequately written, including some poor writing. What bothered me more were all the characters’ exaggerated reactions. Lucy is almost frantic about Rachel from the first scene, when she has just wandered off somewhere–not concerned, frantic. All the characters are constantly starting, stiffening, or being startled. Really, how often does a normal person start? Characters routinely overreact for everything. All this is an artificial attempt to interject drama.

The best I can say for the novel is it made me want to visit Lindisfarne. Sampson obviously had things she wanted to say about its history, however, and the only way she could think of to get them in was through short lectures as part of the course. Besides providing a little color, however, the lectures aren’t really relevant to the story, and repeated verbatim, are far too short to constitute any kind of believable course. I don’t think I’ll be reading more of this series.

Day 380: Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush

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Cover for Lady Gregory's ToothbrushLady Gregory’s Toothbrush is more of a biographical essay than an extensive biography of Lady Gregory, one of the founders with William Butler Yeats of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin and a huge figure in the Irish cultural revival of the 1890’s and early 1900’s. The title of the book is based on a comment she made that reflected her own inconsistencies, that is, her firm roots in the Protestant aristocracy against her support for the culture of rural, Catholic Ireland. When Playboy of the Western World was being produced by the Abbey, there was a huge uproar by Catholic nationalists. Lady Gregory remarked that the dispute was between “those who use a toothbrush and those who don’t.”

Tóibín’s sketch effectively shows the contradictions in Gregory’s character. It would be easy to dismiss her as an elitist snob, but Tóibín makes very clear her contributions to Irish theatre and folk lore. She was one of the first people traveling to rural Ireland to collect Irish folk tales before they were forgotten. As well as writing her own plays as part of the movement to encourage and advance Irish culture, she collaborated with Yeats on his without credit, and some of her contemporaries believed she wrote the bulk of one or two.

An interesting detail from Lady Gregory’s life is how this redoubtable woman cossetted and gave in to Yeats. Tóibín recounts her son Robert’s indignation, for example, when he found that his mother had served Yeats “bottle by bottle” the entirety of his prized Tokay handed down to him by his father.

Copper Beech in Coole Park
The copper beech at Coole Park

Tóibín makes very clear the love she had for her husband’s estate, Coole, which she carefully preserved for her son while he was in his minority. There she entertained many of the great talents of Ireland, including Yeats, his brother Jack, J. M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, and Sean O’Casey. The home no longer stands, Tóibín says it has been covered in concrete, but I myself have seen the great copper beech bearing their initials.

If I have any complaint of this short book, it is at my own ignorance (even though I have done some reading), for my lack of knowledge of the events of this time and particularly of the plays discussed makes it difficult to understand some of Tóibín’s remarks, particularly the furor around some of the plays. Having never read or seen Playboy of the Western World, for example, I don’t understand what was so upsetting (and indeed he implies that a modern audience may not).

Tóibín effectively and elegantly draws a brief but balanced portrait of this complex woman, showing us both her accomplishments and faults. Although I have read some of Yeats’ poems and some of Shaw’s plays, this short work makes me want to do more exploring around these figures in the Irish cultural nationalism movement and their works.

Day 379: A Delicate Truth

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Cover for A Delicate TruthBest Book of the Week!

A mid-level diplomat called Paul is sent on a mission to Gibralter with an army detachment and some mercenaries to capture a terrorist about to do an arms deal. Paul’s role is to act as the “red telephone,” keeping the minister in charge, Quinn, appraised. The agreement is that no action will be taken on British soil without British approval.

A person is spotted in the houses that the teams are monitoring, and there is an argument about whether to go ahead. The British, lead by a Welshman named Jeb and backed by Paul, argue that there is not enough evidence to proceed, but the mercenaries start to move anyway, and Quinn then gives permission to go. During the actual mission, though, all the monitors in the command center where Paul is waiting go dead, and Paul has to take the word of Elliott, the head mercenary, that everything went as planned.

Returning to a few days before the mission, Tony Bell, Quinn’s private secretary, is looking for help. For months, Quinn has been going AWOL, leaving him out of meetings, and keeping documents from him.

Toby has unofficially been informed that Quinn was censured a few years ago for a mission that went wrong involving a mercenary company lead by Jay Crispin. Quinn was forgiven but told not to consort with Crispin. Now Toby finds that Quinn has been meeting with Crispin and even sneaking him into the Foreign Office on the weekend. However, Toby is not supposed to know about the prior incident, so he has nowhere to turn. Taking a drastic decision, he secretly tapes a meeting about the mission to Gibralter. But his mentor, who originally was the one to break confidentiality, fails him, and soon he is sent to another posting.

A few years later, Kit Probyn, lately known as Paul, has retired to his wife’s property in Cornwall when he runs into Jeb, no longer a soldier but a leather worker who makes the rounds of fairs. Jeb tells him that the Gibralter mission, which Kit thought was a success, actually went horribly wrong and that Jeb himself was used as the fall guy. When Kit decides to collect evidence and blow the whistle, he turns to Toby with what he has learned. Although Toby is more aware of the dangers of their task than Kit is, neither has any idea of what they are getting into.

This novel is another of Le Carré’s taut and cynical thrillers, now moving from espionage to the theme of mixing private enterprise with politics and the fight against terrorism. Although not quite up there with The Constant Gardener, which I think is one of the best and most touching of Le Carré’s post-Cold War thrillers, it is deeply involving and tense. With Le Carré, you are never sure of whether good or evil will win, which makes his novels that much more exciting. He is really the master of this genre.

Day 378: Cascade

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Cover for CascadeIt would be nice to know how much O’Hara expects us to like Desdemona Hart Spaulding, the heroine of Cascade. Unfortunately, I think we may be thrust too abruptly into Dez’s troubles to get to like her.

A promising artist who has studied in Boston and Paris, Dez has already been forced to leave that life when we meet her. The Great Depression cost her father his fortune, and he had to close down the famous theater he founded in the resort town of Cascade and sell his treasured First Folio of Shakespeare. Dez was forced to withdraw from art school and hastily married her childhood friend Asa Spaulding so that she and her father would have somewhere to live. Her father dies soon after, and she is taken aback to find he has left the theater to Asa.

Still, considering she married a man with little interest in or understanding of her drive to create art, Asa has set aside a bright room in their house for her studio, and she paints for several hours on most days. Asa wants a child, though, and Dez fears that her precious painting time would be taken up with child rearing. She is secretly doing what she can to prevent conception.

Two things soon make her dissatisfied with her life. Her art school friend Abby stops by on her way to a new life in New York, and suddenly everything in the depressed town looks shabby, even the beloved playhouse. Dez has also formed a friendship with a Jewish man named Jacob Solomon, who has taken over his father’s peddlar’s route. Jacob, though, is a gifted artist who plans to sell his father’s inventory and move to New York, hoping for a job with the Works Progress Administration. He meets Dez once a week to discuss art, but after a dispute, Asa asks her to stop meeting Jacob.

Asa is concerned because the town is under threat. Cascade is one of two possible towns that may be flooded to create a reservoir that will supply water to Boston. Asa wants to mobilize an effort to save Cascade, and Dez has the idea to paint a series of postcards showing Cascade in the past and present in an attempt to garner public support for the town. She is able to sell this idea to a prominent national magazine. All the while, however, she is secretly hoping the town will lose and she will have an excuse to move to a large city. The agreement she makes with the magazine and other disastrous decisions cause her to betray her husband, her town, and finally even Jacob.

I think O’Hara wants us to sympathize with Dez in her growing ambition to go to New York and take up a career in art. But some of her actions don’t just show poor judgment; they are despicable. As the plot advances, I feel less and less sympathy for her.

A review from the Boston Globe calls Dez complex and says she doesn’t always make the right choices. I think it’s worse than that; the trouble is really with where she places her priorities. The town is in danger of dying, in the horrible economy many people’s welfares are at risk, but Dez puts her future as an artist first and barely gives the other townspeople a thought, in fact, seems to feel superior to them. She supposedly yearns to reopen her father’s playhouse but doesn’t seem to give it much attention when it is threatened, although she eventually makes a deal that saves it. She has married for selfish reasons and is all too ready to give up on her marriage.

Of course, the principal theme of the novel is how much to give up for art, but in this case, it is not Dez who does the sacrificing. I wish I had liked this novel better. I think that if we’d had a longer time with Dez in her art student life and gotten to know her before she began a series of lies, deceptions, and betrayals, I could have felt more sympathy with her struggle.