Category: books

Day 152: The Master

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Cover for The MasterThe Master, Colm Tóibín’s engrossing novel about Henry James, is virtually plotless. Over the course of five years, James works, visit friends, and remembers significant events in his life and people who are important to him. At the same time he muses on how the people, tales they tell, or incidents he has observed have informed or will inform his writing.

I have often found James’s work perplexing, feeling as if there is a lot going on under the surface that I don’t understand. A novel about him, therefore, is not an intuitive choice for me. Nevertheless, I found myself extremely involved in this story about a man who appears to have always stood back and watched. In Tóibín’s view, James lived a life of “pure coldness.”

The book delicately depicts a complex man, social on the surface but always at an emotional remove from others, homosexual but so concerned about propriety and public opinion that he never acts on it (perhaps–that is not entirely clear) and avoids situations where he may be tempted. He is sometimes very cold in his inaction, such as when he deserts his best friend, Constance Fenimore Woolson, because she has been too open for his taste about their completely innocent relationship, causing some friends to blame him for her subsequent suicide.

The most fascinating part of the novel, in my opinion, is how it illuminates the way that a writer may take a situation, a sentence, thoughts about how a pair of people interact, and turn them into a complete work of fiction. For example, a tale told to him about two children alone on an estate reminds him of his relationship with his sister Alice. As children, both of them had been abandoned as their family toured Europe and have never been fully included in the events and emotions of the family. These memories finally emerge in the ghost story “The Turn of the Screw.” Similarly, his memories of his intelligent, vivacious cousin Minny Temple are brought back to life in first The Portrait of a Lady and then The Wings of a Dove.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, The Master is an evocative novel about the inner life of an emotionally crippled writer.

Day 151: Moonfleet

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Cover for MoonfleetMoonfleet is a boy’s adventure story similar to Kidnapped or Treasure Island. Written by J. Meade Falkner in 1898, it was very popular for many years. I had actually never heard of it but picked it up out of curiosity a couple of years ago.

John Trenchard is an orphan boy who lives with his aunt in the small village of Moonfleet in the south of England in 1757. The village has been dominated by the Mohune family for centuries. There is a legend that Colonel John “Blackbeard” Mohune stole a diamond from King Charles I and that his ghost roams the crypts looking for it.

One day John hears noises from Mohune’s crypt, and when he goes to investigate, finds the landlord of the local inn, Elzevir Block, and Mr. Ratsey, the sexton, who say they are looking for damage from a storm. John assumes they are looking for Blackbeard’s ghost. He finds his way into the crypt through a large sinkhole and gets inadvertantly trapped there overnight. While he is trapped there, he overhears enough to realize that Block and Ratsey are actually smugglers.

John’s aunt assumes he has been up to no good when he doesn’t come back for the night, so she throws him out of the house. Fortunately, Block takes him in. But when Block’s lease expires, the lease goes up for auction and is purchased by Maskew, the unpopular local magistrate. Before Block leaves the area, John accompanies him on one last smuggling venture, during which Maskew, who has lain in wait for the smugglers with the excisemen, is accidentally shot by the excisemen. John is wounded and is falsely accused in absentia of murdering Maskew, so he must flee to the continent.

The rest of John’s adventures include diamond hunting, being imprisoned for theft when he is cheated by an avaricious diamond merchant, working as a galley slave, and shipwreck. Moonfleet is an exciting book with a gripping story line that is still popular with children.

Day 150: The Torso

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Cover for The TorsoThe Torso is a pedestrian police procedural by Helene Tursten. A torso washes up on a Swedish beach. The investigation finds that a similar murder occurred in Copenhagen, so Detective Irene Huss travels there to consult with the Danish police. Victims are being strangled and then after death dismembered and their organs removed. Not only are the leads to the murderer few, but the police are having difficulty identifying the original torso.

The novel is ploddingly written with no particular suspense. The characters all remain sketchily depicted except Huss, and her every thought is recorded, no matter how mundane. Unfortunately, many of her thoughts are mundane. Every character is thoroughly described including each person’s changes of outfits.

Speaking of Huss’s thoughts, despite having a loving husband and two teenage daughters, she seems to be prepared at one point to launch into an affair with a Danish policeman without any thought at all for her family.

My biggest negative reaction has to do with unlikeliness in the investigation. Perhaps police procedure is different in Sweden than here, but I was surprised to find the coroner providing a profiler lecture based upon one examination of the body and a lot of supposition. For example, there is an assumption throughout that the organs are removed to be eaten, even though there is no proof of that. In addition, the reactions of Huss and other offficers to some sights and remarks seem to be implausibly squeamish, considering their positions. It also seems implausible to me that the team would retain the obnoxious alcoholic cop Jonny, who seems to be incompetent to boot. Rather than assume Swedish procedure and police behavior is that different, I am inclined to believe that Tursten doesn’t know anything about criminal investigations.

Finally, the denoument of the novel is anticlimactic. The murderer has been stalking Huss, so we might expect a terrifying finale. No such thing happens. Although the novel is clearly meant to appeal to those who like dark, gruesome fiction, it completely fails to provide any suspense or atmosphere.

Day 149: Hons and Rebels

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Cover for Hons and RebelsAfter reading the other Mitfords’ criticisms of this book in The House of Mitford, I expected a biography that was cruel and critical, but Hons and Rebels is mostly an amusing story of Jessica Mitford’s teenage rebellion. The Guinesses (authors of The House of Mitford and Jessica Mitford’s nephew and great-niece), who claimed that Jessica Mitford lied on several points, do not seem to have considered the common phenomenon that people who experience the same things frequently remember them differently, from their own frames of reference. A different recollection of an event in the far past (and in one case an apparent misidentification) is not necessarily lying.

I became interested in finding a good biography of the Mitfords after re-reading several of Nancy Mitford’s novels. I was curious about the kind of family that could have spawned children with such radically different ideas and such extreme characters. Unfortunately, at the time, I was only able to find a couple of biographies written by family members, this being one.

Nancy Mitford, of course, was a brilliant social satirist and author of several light comic novels–and not as politically involved as some of the other girls. Diana left her aristocratic husband, Bryan Guiness, for the infamous British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, and was interred with him in prison during World War II for their pro-German sympathies. Unity Mitford became a fan and friend of Adolf Hitler and shot herself in the head the day that Britain declared war against Germany, but failed to kill herself and was mentally disabled for the rest of her life. On the other hand, Jessica as a teenager ran off to the Spanish Civil War with the socialist Esmond Romilly, whom she married. Later she moved to the United States and became a member of the American Communist Party and a famous muckraking journalist.

Hons and Rebels covers Jessica’s childhood, rebellion, later life in the States, and estrangement from the rest of the family. It is light and easy to read, and quite funny. It depicts Esmond and Jessica as extremely naive but equally unprincipled. Mitford does not attack the other family members, as I would have expected after the comments in The House of Mitford. If anything, she looks back at them all nostalgically. In fact, as I commented in my review of the other book, the Guinesses are more prone to attack and criticize the other Mitfords, particularly Jessica and Nancy, and try to mitigate the faults of the Mosleys and the fanaticism of Unity. The only biography I can find written by an unbiased author is apparently superficial and focuses on Unity, so I guess my curiosity about the Mitfords will remain unsatisfied.

Just a note for my consistent readers: I thought that by reviewing one nonfiction book a week, I would be able to continue to write nonfiction reviews indefinitely, but I have now caught up with my nonfiction reading for the past two years, which just shows how much more fiction I read. From now on, nonfiction reviews will appear as I finish the books instead of more regularly.

Day 148: The Map of True Places

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Cover for The Map of True PlacesThe Map of True Places is another very good book by Brunonia Barry. Zee is a psychotherapist with a shattering past. The death of her patient Lilly, a bipolar housewife who jumped off a bridge, has brought back to Zee memories of her own mother’s suicide. Her father Finch was unfaithful to her bipolar mother with another man, and when Zee was 11, her mother committed suicide by swallowing strychnine. Zee came home in time to witness the fatal convulsions.

Zee goes to visit her father and finds that his Parkinson’s disease has turned to dementia and he has kicked his partner Melville out of the house. She decides to take a leave of absence from her practice to care for Finch. Trying to come to terms with the past and figure out what to do with Finch, she begins to doubt everything in her life. As she finds out the truth about many of the myths in her life, Zee also finds clues about what happened to Lilly in her final days.

This second book of Barry’s is also set in Salem, Massachusetts, and features some of the same characters as in The Lace Reader. I have really enjoyed both of Barry’s books. She creates a strong sense of place in the quirky Salem and populates her novels with complex, interesting characters.

Day 147: Quo Vadis

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Cover for Quo VadisI picked up Quo Vadis because I so much enjoyed Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Polish history trilogy, as you know if you read my review of With Fire and Sword. This novel is about a young Roman patrician, Vinicius, who falls in love with Ligia,  a Christian, in the time of Nero’s rule. Sienkiewicz did extensive research on the period to get the details right.

About half of the book is about Vinicius’s pursuit of Ligia, first through ruthless means, including kidnapping (presumably pagan patricians have no morals), and later through conversion to Christianity. I was frankly uninterested in either Vinicius or Ligia, who are cardboard characters, and I couldn’t care less about whether they got together.

The last half of the book is about the burning of Rome and the persecution of the Christians. It features the last days of St. Paul.  The pace picks up a little here, but overall the novel is marred by its focus on extolling Christianity. All of the Christians are noble, and most of the other characters are not. Sienkiewicz was a devout Catholic, as is obvious from a few scenes in all his books, and I can only think that the added emphasis on this aspect in this particular novel gets in the way of the book’s effectiveness, at least as viewed by a modern audience.

I know that Quo Vadis was extremely popular in its time (it was published in 1896) and contributed toward Sienkiewicz winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. I also know that Sienkiewicz was capable of creating more interesting characters and writing more exciting scenes. Perhaps the times have just changed too much since this book was written for it to appeal to a wide audience now.

Day 146: Broken Harbor

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Cover for Broken HarborBest Book of the Week!
I have eagerly awaited each new novel by Irish author Tana French ever since reading her first, In the Woods. She has only gotten better. A technique she has employed from the first is to use a secondary character from one book as her protagonist for the next–a creative way to provide continuity for a stand-alone story.

Mick Kennedy briefly appeared in French’s last book, Faithful Place, as a brash, abrasive cop. Although not all his coworkers like his bullheaded, aggressive manner, he has a high solve rate and goes completely by the book. He lands an important case, an attack on an entire family. Pat and Jenny Spain and their two children were attacked in their home in an upscale development that has floundered since the economic downturn–in Brianstown, which Mick knows as Broken Harbor. Only Jenny has a chance of surviving. Mick takes along as partner a rookie detective he thinks has potential.

When the detectives get to Broken Harbor, they find almost a lunar landscape of half-built, crumbling houses and rubble with only a few badly built occupied homes. The Spain’s house, however, is immaculate when you look past the blood. But something strange has been going on. Holes are smashed in the walls, monitors and cameras are strategically placed, and a vicious trap is set up in the attic. The computer has been wiped, and the “floaters” discover that someone has been camping out in a nearby house and spying on the Spains.

Broken Harbor holds a mix of confusing memories for Mick. His family spent two weeks there every summer when it was a modest fishing town. He was happy there, but at the end of the last summer, his mother committed suicide. Mick has been purposefully ignoring his unresolved feelings in addition to coping with a mentally ill younger sister.

Broken Harbor is a police procedural that becomes a riveting psychological suspense novel. Unlike with some of French’s earlier books, I was unable to decide between the competing suspects. But whether you can guess the solution or not, you’ll enjoy French’s novels. They are rich with complex characterizations and intriguing plots. The suspense builds as we begin to understand what was going on in the house and Mick begins to grasp how traumatized he actually is by the events in his past. The novel is dark and disturbing–just the kind of book I like!

Day 145: Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

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Cover for MayflowerMayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War is an eye-opening history of the Pilgrims, starting with their journey to America in 1620 and ending roughly 50 years later with King Philip’s War. King Philip’s War began as a small local conflict between the Plymouth Colony and King Philip, the sachem of the Pokanokets, and ended as a regional war that killed, author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals, a higher percentage of the population than any other American war.

What makes Mayflower most interesting is how Philbrick takes on the old myths–Plymouth Rock (if a rock was used, it wasn’t that one), the first Thanksgiving (actually begun by Abraham Lincoln, although there was a feast in early fall), Squanto (not such a nice guy), the courtship of Miles Standish–and provides new ways of looking at what happened.

Although the book touches on many aspects of the Pilgrims’ lives, a major theme is their relationship with the native people. The very bonds formed when Massasoit and the Pokanokets saved the original settlers from starvation and illness, when broken by the Pilgrims’ sons, are those that resulted in the destabilization of the entire New England region for years to come.

The book provides fascinating insights into these people, who had a mission for their own lives but little tolerance for others, who bravely founded a successful colony but fathered offspring whose greed, rigidity, and racism almost destroyed the results of those efforts. With his focus on relations with Native Americans, Philbrick skims over some other important elements, for example, the Pilgrims’ dissident faith, the expulsion of Roger Williams, the relationship between Plymouth and the colonies founded by Puritans and others. However, the book is focused on a topic that is interesting to a 21st century audience and has not had much discussion.