This week’s Best Book is Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett!
Author: whatmeread
Day 335: A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube
In December 1933, nineteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out alone on a great adventure, a walking trip from Amsterdam to Istanbul, or as Fermor still called it, Constantinople. (It was renamed in 1930.) He had no idea when he left that he would not return until 1937. In 1977, he collected his notebooks from the trip and wrote A Time of Gifts and its sequel Between the Woods and the Water.
Although Leigh Fermor had one notebook stolen from him with all the rest of his gear, he otherwise must have kept careful account and his memories of the trip must still have been vivid, for the result is an entrancing account of scenery and architecture, tales of chance encounters, glimpses of foreign customs and celebrations, and so on. Jan Morris, who wrote the introduction, calls him “one of the great prose stylists of our time,” and Wikipedia, quoting an unnamed British journalist, “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene,” presumably for his work with the Cretan resistance in World War II as well as his writing. (He was also a friend of Ian Fleming.)
From his drinking bouts with Dutch barge men to his extended stays in various German, Austrian, and Czech castles, Leigh Fermor plunges enthusiastically into every experience on offer. At one moment he is sleeping in a barn, in the next hanging out with fashionable youth in Vienna. Along the banks of the Danube he is mistaken for a 50-year-old smuggler. All of these adventures as well as his observations of nature are described in beautiful, evocative prose. To add interest to the modern reader, he is describing a Europe that no longer exists.
If I have any complaint, it is one of my own education, for Leigh Fermor’s writing assumes for his audience a familiarity with classical culture that is no longer common. The book often alludes to mythology and refers to obscure historical events that I do not fully understand. Finally, in the footnotes, which are Leigh Fermor’s original ones, all utterances in modern languages (some of which I could have taken a stab at) are translated, but the quotations in Latin are not. They are not integral to comprehension, but it is a little frustrating to be unable to understand them. (Of course, I could have googled them, but I was almost always reading this on the bus.) That being said, I look forward to reading the sequel.
Day 334: Pawn in Frankincense
Best Book of the Week!
In the fourth exciting book of the Lymond Chronicles, Francis Crawford of Lymond sets out to find his two-year-old child by Oonagh O’Dwyer, hidden somewhere in the vast Ottoman Empire. He disguises his personal mission with the official one of delivering an elaborately decorated piano from the King of France to the Sultan in Constantinople. Another goal is to find and kill the traitor Graham Mallet Reid, who has the child in his power. The problem of the child is complicated because Lymond doesn’t know which of two boys, one Reid’s by his sister Joleta, is his own. Another complication is that if any harm comes to Reid, the boys, under the protection of Sulieman, will both be murdered.
Accompanying him and his household are a couple of merchants, including the mysterious Marthe. Raised in the household of the Dame de Doubtance, Marthe, except for her sex, could be Lymond’s identical twin.
After some disastrous adventures, Lymond believes he has sent home the redoubtable fifteen-year-old Philippa Somerville, who foisted herself upon him thinking he would need her help to care for the child. However, she is actually on her way to join the seraglio to find one of the boys, Kuzum, while Lymond searches in the stews of the city for the other one, Khaireddin. Philippa’s role in this novel is a major one, with her character and her opinion of Lymond changing and maturing as their adventures continue.
Aside from the intrigues taking place in an empire that is Byzantine in its complexity (not to make a pun), Lymond is hampered in his activities because of sabotage by a member of his own household staff. He also suffers from his usual problem of failing to explain his actions to his adherents, such as Jerrott Blyth, so that they become angry and occasionally work against him.
In action that moves from Marseilles across Europe to North Africa and finally to Constantinople, Lymond’s concerns grow to involve the fate of nations.
Day 333: Pigeon Pie
This exceedingly silly book about Britain just before World War II has its amusing moments. Although it is not one of Mitford’s best, it still made me laugh out loud at times. The novel spoofs British high society, spy stories, and religious cults.
The heroine is Lady Sophia Garfield, a stupid, frivolous society matron who lives happily, mutually ignoring her husband, who admires Hitler. As events move toward war, she begins to suspect she has a nest of German spies in her home. Although no one believes her, she eventually manages to foil them.
One of the funniest moments for me has to do with Lady Sophia’s chief social rival, whom she distinctly remembers as the ordinary school girl Baby Bagg but who goes around pretending to be a Russian princess, Olga Golgothsky. Inclined to the theatrical, Olga frequently makes remarks about what would happen to her if she went to Russia–she says she would be handed over to the peasants to do what they please. Our heroine reflects on what Russian peasants must be like, thinking that if she were handed over to British peasants to do what they please, they would put her in the best bedroom and give her a cup of tea.
Day 332: A Serpent’s Tooth
Having caught up with author Craig Johnson in the Walt Longmire series, I was waiting with interest for this next book, which just came out.
Walt is attending a funeral when a batty old lady begins telling him about the angel who lives in her house and does chores for her while she’s out. At first inclined to dismiss what she is saying, Walt stops to listen and decides to go out to her house. There he finds a teenage boy fixing the plumbing. The boy bolts and Walt finds evidence that he has been living in the spring house.
Once Walt is able to locate the boy, he finds out he is Cord Lynear, a fifteen-year-old castoff of a fundamentalist Mormon group called the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God that has a compound in the county and another one in South Dakota. In his attempts to find Cord’s home, Walt learns that a woman named Sarah Tisdale was looking for the boy at a sheriff’s office in South Dakota and that several men arrived and took the woman away. Walt comes to believe that this woman is one who has been missing for seventeen years, and so his focus changes to finding out what happened to her. The Mormons, however, disclaim all knowledge of her.
The more he looks into it, the more Walt feels that something is going on in their compound, and not anything legal. He is further bemused by the arrival of an old man who states he is Cord’s bodyguard and claims to be Orrin Porter Rockwell, a Mormon hero who would be 200 years old, were he still alive.
Walt is also sensing undercurrents in his relationship with his volatile lover and undersheriff, Vic Moretti. She has stated a desire to go to the homecoming game with him wearing a corsage in the school colors–a request that Walt finds unusual, to say the least. All the activity is preventing him from discussing it with her, however.
This novel is certainly a worthy entry to the series, packed as it is with puzzles, intrigue, and action. My only very slight critique is that some early references in the book made it easy for me to guess what all the skullduggery–that is, the illegal enterprise–was about.
Day 331: Peaches for Father Francis
Last seen in Paris in The Girl with No Shadow, Vianne Rocher has been living there on a boat with Roux and her two daughters. However, the wind is about to blow her back to Lansquenet, the village she left at the end of Chocolat. In fact, her summons comes from the dead, as she receives a letter from her long-departed friend Armande. Armande’s grandson has reached his majority and, with other papers, received and forwarded a letter for Vianne telling her that Lansquenet needs her help.
Roux is mysteriously reluctant to return to Lansquenet, so Vianne takes her daughters Anouk, 15, and Rosette, 5, for the journey back to the village. She arrives during Ramadan and finds the village practically in a state of war. A large population of Moslems has moved into Les Marauds, the slums where Vianne had her chocolaterie. At first cautiously welcomed into the community, the Moslems now are at odds with the original inhabitants.
This state of affairs is almost uniformly being blamed on Ines Bencharki, a veiled, mysterious woman dressed in black. However, it has most urgently affected the fate of Vianne’s old nemesis, Father Francis Reynaud. He has been accused of burning Madame Bencharki’s home, the same building Vianne used for her chocolaterie, which Ines had turned into a school for Moslem girls. Father Francis is expecting to be transferred out of the village by the bishop. Ironically, he finds himself forced to turn to Vianne for help.
Although I continue to enjoy Vianne and her family, I feel that this novel does not contain the magic of the previous two and is a little more predictable. Vianne’s doubts about Roux’s fidelity seem too foreseeably wrong. We know that Vianne favors the underdog, but considering Reynaud’s unrelenting treatment of her in Chocolat, their alliance seems unlikely. The flavor of the small village that makes us want to return there, so evocative in Chocolat, is missing.
Also, few of the secondary characters, so colorful and interesting in the other books, are given much consideration here. Luc, whose house Vianne and her family are staying in, barely gets a mention. Even though Vianne makes friends with several of the Moslem women, their personalities do not stand out, one from the other. Only the old lady Omi is her own self. The sole old friend who gets any attention is Joséphine.
Nevertheless, it is always a pleasure to spend time with Vianne. There is real danger in this novel and an evil villain. And as always, the novel is beautifully written.
Special Post! Best Book of the Week!
This week’s Best Book is Life After Life by Kate Atkinson!
Day 330: Adamtine
Adamtine is the second of Hannah Berry’s moody noirish graphic novels after Britten and Brülightly. Whereas the first novel was a noir crime effort with a wry sense of humor (the detective’s partner is a tea bag), it is not clear to me whether Adamtine is a crime or a horror novel.
Four people who know something about an earlier series of disappearances are traveling home on a train when it stops in the middle of nowhere. At the time of the earlier crimes, a man named Rodney Moon was put on trial, but he claimed to have only passed notes to the victims. There are hints of the involvement of a large corporation.
The story is told with flashbacks to the previous crimes, although it was difficult for me to tell sometimes which scenes are those from the past and which are from the present. It was also unclear to me what exactly happens to the people, but perhaps the atmosphere created is of most importance.
The art is beautiful, with its muted, moody tones. I think this graphic novel is visually interesting and intriguing, but I find it difficult at times to completely understand the parts of the narrative that are told only in pictures.
Day 329: Still Life
Still Life is the first of Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache mysteries. It provides us an introduction to the kindly Gamache and his team and to the beautiful village of Three Pines, where many of the subsequent mysteries are set.
An elderly woman named Jane Neal is found dead in the woods near Three Pines, shot apparently by a careless bow hunter. Inspector Gamache and his team are initially called in to ascertain whether the suspicious death is an accident or a homicide. Gamache quickly determines that the death was a homicide and then begins to look for the murderer.
Although Jane was highly regarded by most folks in the village, one suspect is her cold and greedy niece, Yolande Fontaine, who can’t wait to get her hands on her aunt’s property. Her husband has a criminal record, and her son is a delinquent who may have been out with a bow on the day of the murder.
Through this novel we get to know the characters who recur throughout the series–Olivier and Gabri, the gay owners of the bistro and bed and breakfast; Clara and Peter Morrow, local artists; Myrna Landers, a former psychologist who owns the bookstore; and Ruth Zardo, an eccentric curmudgeon who turns out to be a famous poet. Another important character is Ben Hadley, Peter Morrow’s best friend for years, whose mother died a month before from cancer.
Penny’s mysteries have the feel of cozies set in a small village, like some of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books. Her characters are well developed and interesting. The peaceful atmosphere of the village is palpable. I had a disadvantage in reading this novel after most of the others, so it was clear to me that the murderer was someone who no longer lives in the village in the later books. This narrowed the field considerably. I would advise those who are interested in reading Louise Penny’s series to start with Still Life and try to move forward in order.
Day 328: Hamlet
My husband likes his jokes. When I told him I was re-reading Hamlet, he said, “It’s full of clichés, you know.” But it was amazing to see how many lines from this play are so familiar to all of us, have almost entered our societal DNA.
Everyone is familiar with the plot. Hamlet’s father, the King of Denmark, has died, and Hamlet’s mother Gertrude has married his uncle Claudius, his father’s brother, who is now king. Hamlet is in grief and dismay at his father’s death and his mother’s quick remarriage. In the first act of the play, Hamlet meets the ghost of his father, who tells him that Claudius murdered him by pouring poison in his ear as he slept. The ghost orders Hamlet to avenge his death.
One of the puzzlers for me about this play is the reason why Hamlet then chooses to fake insanity. It allows Hamlet to continually bait Claudius and Gertrude without consequences, but otherwise does not make sense to me.
An interesting point raised in the introduction of my version of the Collected Works is that Polonius, in appearance and behavior, is meant to be William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth I’s chief minister. The claustrophobic feeling in the play of not being able to trust anyone, of being spied on (depicted marvelously in the 2009 Royal Shakespeare Company production, starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart), reflects the paranoid nature of Tudor society because of the prevalence of espionage at that time.
Of course, Hamlet’s musings on suicide, death, and the nature of revenge are a major focus of the play. An undoubted message seems to be of the unintended consequences of actions, particularly of revenge. Hamlet and Laertes are bent on revenge, but in obtaining it, they manage to wipe out both their families.
I have seen Hamlet played as a drooping figure of indecision, but I don’t think this is a correct interpretation. Hamlet is caught on the crux of a dilemma. He wants to do what is right but knows that whatever action he chooses, the results will not be pretty. Hence, the inaction.
What? Me Read? 