Day 453: Burial Rites

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Cover for Burial RitesBest Book of the Week!

Based on the true story of the last woman to be executed in Iceland, Burial Rites is an unusual and original novel.

Agnes Magnúsdóttir has been found guilty of the murder of her employer, Natan Ketílsson, and another man when the novel begins. There is no doubt that Fridrik Sigurdsson committed the act, but Agnes and her fellow servant Sigrídur Gudmundsdóttir have also been found guilty on little more evidence than that they were present at the scene. The younger, prettier Sigrídur, who was Natan’s mistress and Fridrik’s fiancée, is being considered for a pardon, but Agnes is not.

Because Iceland does not apparently have facilities for housing criminals at the time, the District Commissioner Björn Blöndal decides to lodge Agnes until her execution at Kórnsa, the farm of the District Officer of Vatnsdalur, Jón Jónsson. Agnes has requested that the young Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson, newly ordained, supervise her spiritual welfare.

Jón Jónsson’s wife and daughter are horrified to learn they are to have a convicted murderess in their house. Reverend Jónsson, known as Tóti, is confused, feeling insufficiently experienced for the task and unaware that he has already met Agnes.

We first see Agnes on her way to Kórnsa. She has been kept in a storeroom, living in filth and seldom fed, since her conviction. When she arrives at the farm, she seems almost subhuman, grimy and greasy and so thirsty that she gulps down some dirty dishwater given her to wash in. Slowly, through her hard work and unobjectionable demeanor and their own basic decency, the family comes to believe Agnes may not be guilty of the crime.

Although the focus of this novel is the life on the farm and the evolving relationship between Agnes and the family of Jón Jónsson, we eventually learn the truth about the crime, as Agnes confides it to Tóti and the family.

Kent’s gift is for depicting the hard life of 19th century Iceland—the merciless fate of itinerant servants, the prevalence of gossip and superstition, the brutal conditions and physically demanding work. Kent also describes the mental landscape of Agnes, her memories, thoughts, and nighttime dreams, and less frequently those of Margrét, Jón Jónsson’s wife, and of Tóti.

This novel is evocatively written in beautiful, spare prose. It tells a heartbreaking and haunting story.

Day 452: Under the Wide and Starry Sky

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Cover for Under the Wide and Starry SkyUnder the Wide and Starry Sky traces the relationship between Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny from shortly before the two meet. At that time, he was a young man still trying to decide his profession and she was a married woman, although separated from her husband, ten years his senior and with children.

Fanny Osbourne has a great creative urge, and she has moved to Paris for art lessons for both herself and her grown daughter Belle, leaving her philandering husband in America. Fanny meets Stevenson while on a recuperative visit to southern France after the death of her youngest son.

The novel follows closely the entirety of their relationship from courtship to his death and her life afterwards, mostly from Fanny’s point of view. They separate because Fanny wants to give her marriage another chance, but they finally come together again. Stevenson, called Louis by his friends, is a sickly man, and his health often requires them to move to climates that are better for his lungs. When it seems as though he cannot live much longer, they find that his health revives on ocean voyages, so they go to sea and finally settle in Samoa until his death.

Although Horan appears to follow faithfully the course and events of the couple’s life together, and the novel is interesting from that standpoint, she never really brings the characters or settings to life. Aside from Fanny’s devotion to Louis, Horan concentrates on her frustration at not being able to live her own creative life. The characters seem relatively flat.

http://www.netgalley.comI was struck also by how, on the original voyage to the South Seas, Horan describes almost nothing but one chieftain until they get to Samoa. If she was working from journals or letters, surely she could have researched further to find out or even imagine what the islands would have been like for Louis and Fanny, seeing them the first time. Instead, we come into their voyage toward the end, as if all the sights and experiences are routine. I’m missing the sense of wonder. Although this novel should have been fascinating in its focus on some amazing lives, it generally does not fulfill its promise.

Day 451: The Year of Magical Thinking

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Cover for The Year of Magical ThinkingThe Year of Magical Thinking is Joan Didion’s candid account of the first year after the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and the serious illness of their daughter Quintana Roo (which sadly resulted in her death after the time frame of this book).

The couple had just returned from the hospital, where their daughter’s illness had progressed from flu to pneumonia to septic shock. Dunne died in a manner that was so sudden, falling over forward on his face at the table, that Didion at first thought he was joking.

What follows is an honest description of Didion’s mental functioning and thoughts as she tries to deal with competing traumas in her life—the refusal to believe her husband might not be coming back (she won’t give away his shoes in case he needs them), the constant speculation about what she might have done differently that could have saved him (what if they stayed in Malibu? what if they moved to Hawaii?), the attempt to avoid anything that reminds her of time she spent with her husband. She makes a careful distinction between grief and mourning.

What characterizes this book is the unstinting look at the author’s experience, a willingness to document everything, without avoidance or euphemism. Didion’s intelligence shines through every passage as she contemplates our culture’s relationship with death—for one thing, the harm we have done by ridding ourselves of its ceremonies and even its trappings.

Day 450: The Bone People

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Cover for The Bone PeopleThe Bone People is a very unusual novel, and I’m not sure what I think of it. I would give an unreservedly enthusiastic review except for one overriding facet of the plot and an ending that radically changes course.

Kerewin Holmes is a wealthy half-European, half-Maori woman who builds a tower on the New Zealand seaside. She clearly identifies more with the Maori culture than the European. Kerewin is an artist who for some time has been unable to create art and has separated herself from her family. She fills her tower with beautiful objects and oddities and stays away from people.

One day she comes home to find a young boy hiding in her house and quickly discovers he does not speak. The boy takes a liking to her, which turns out to be unusual. Although the boy appears to be purely of European descent, the man who eventually arrives to pick him up is a Maori man she has seen bragging in a local bar, Joe Gillayley.

The boy, Simon, turns out to have been a shipwreck victim as a very young child, the couple found with him not his parents. His identity has never been discovered, and Joe and his family adopted him. However, Joe’s wife Hana and son Timote died later from an illness.

Simon has an unruly streak, and Kerewin finds him spending the day with her at the tower when he decides to skip school. Kerewin feels there is something wrong about both the man and the boy, but soon begins to care about them and even tries to find out about the boy based on an unusual ring in his possession.

The blurb on this book calls it a mystery and a love story, but if you go into it with that kind of expectation, you are going to be confused. The narrative style is unusual. It is told from multiple viewpoints, although mostly from Kerewin’s, and Kerewin makes up poetry or sings little songs almost constantly. As the novel progresses, more Maori cultural references and mysticism appear.

Spoilers in this paragraph: I would normally not reveal this important a plot point, as it appears well into the book, but I feel I have to in order to explain my mixed reaction. It takes some time before Kerewin discovers that Joe, who usually treats Simon lovingly, sometimes beats him savagely in an attempt to control his behavior. Moreover, the whole town appears to be aware of this but does nothing. Kerewin is torn because she feels Joe really loves Simon and bitterly regrets these beatings, but she does not seem to realize (nor is there a sense of this in the book at all) that this is classic abusive behavior. So, no one turns Joe in to the authorities. Kerewin’s solution is to beat the crap out of Joe, as she has training in aikido, and then to make him promise not to discipline Simon without talking to her. This solution is obviously a stupid one, although it works for some time. When things come to a head, the result is horrendous.

Then the novel continues from there in another direction, which is disconcerting. I could not reconcile my feelings about what happens to Simon with my interest in the book up until that point. In fact, having the novel almost immediately shoot off in another direction was very distressing to me, and even though it eventually returns to the original events and ties everything up, the direction it goes in the closing sections seems to belong to a different novel.

If the child in peril theme is not one for you, I can tell you that the ending is unexpectedly and, I feel, unrealistically happy, and delves into the theme of a re-emergence of Maori culture. Maybe I am viewing this novel through some kind of cultural myopia, but the ending seems to me to magically wipe out a lot of problems, including legal complications. I understand that this novel was severely edited from its original form, much against Hulme’s wishes, which makes we wonder what the original novel would have been like.

Day 449: The Signature of All Things

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Cover for The Signature of All ThingsBest Book of the Week!

I was not really eager to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love a few years ago for my book club, especially the pray part. But I discovered writing that was comic and intelligent and a story that was much more interesting than I expected.

In The Signature of All Things, Gilbert turns to fiction to tell the story of the life of a remarkable woman. Alma Whittaker is the daughter of a man born in poverty, the son of a frutier for Kew Gardens. Determined to become a wealthy gentleman, Henry Whittaker as a boy steals cuttings from the gardens to sell, and after he is caught, is dispatched by Sir Joseph Banks to gather plants on several voyages of discovery, including Captain Cook’s last.

Eventually, Henry breaks from Banks to start a pharmaceutical industry in Philadelphia. He marries a Dutch wife from a family of botanists and builds a series of greenhouses filled with plants from around the world.

Alma spends her childhood roaming the woods around her house and becomes a brilliant botanist but an unattractive girl and woman, tall and ungainly. She is much better with plants than with people, and when her mother Beatrix decides to adopt the beautiful orphaned daughter of a local prostitute, Alma is never able to develop a sisterly feeling for Prudence.

Although Alma spends much of her life there on her father’s estate, it is nonetheless an exceptional one, as she develops her own professional reputation, and eventually she ends up traveling farther than she ever expected she might. Gilbert takes time with her—time to develop her into a complex personality.

The course of her life takes a fateful turn when she encounters Ambrose Pike, an artist who has been living in South America and has painted the most beautiful pictures of orchids she has ever seen. Ambrose is of a spiritual turn of mind. He believes in the “signature of all things,” an old idea that god has left his imprint on everything on earth so that man will know its use. Although Alma, as a scientist, understands the fallacies in this notion, she finds she loves the man. But he has ideas about the pursuit of human perfection that she doesn’t comprehend.

This novel is beautifully written, completely different from Gilbert’s first book except for being a voyage through a human heart. I became fully engaged with Alma’s story. I grieved with her over her romantic disappointments and was impressed by how she snapped herself back into a productive life. This novel is an enthralling and satisfying story of an early woman scientist, about how a lonely but determined woman makes her own place in the world. Although Alma is not really a lovable person, Gilbert is able to make readers understand and care about her.

Day 448: The Tiger in the Smoke

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Cover for The Tiger in the SmokeI have only read one other Albert Campion novel, and that was so long ago that all I can remember is not having much of a sense of Campion. I can say the same thing after reading this novel, although it has other qualities. Perhaps one can only get an understanding of Campion through reading the series.

In this post-World War II novel, we get a feel for the effect of the war on London. The wealthier households no longer have servants, shoddy neighborhoods have sprung up near where service men used to gather, the ruins of bombed buildings are everywhere, as are groups of unemployed veterans. To this setting Allingham adds the further atmosphere of a heavy fog that persists over the course of the novel. This fog is vividly described and is almost a character in the novel.

Meg Elginbrodde, a young war widow, has recently announced her betrothal to Geoffrey Levett, a wealthy businessman. Beginning directly after the announcement, however, Meg receives poor-quality street photographs of someone who looks like her husband, Martin Elginbrodde, supposedly blown to bits during a battle. No message has arrived explaining these photos, and when we meet the engaged couple, Geoffrey is dropping Meg off for a rendezvous that Campion has arranged as a trap for the culprit.

Meg is to walk into the train station to meet the man, where Campion and the police will capture him. However, when Meg sees the man at a distance, his resemblance to Martin is so strong that she shouts his name and runs toward him, startling him away. Campion eventually captures him, and Meg is embarrassed and puzzled to find that close up, the man doesn’t look like Martin at all. He turns out to be a low-level criminal named Duds Morrison.

Campion and Detective Charlie Luke are fairly confident that someone hired Duds for the impersonation, but what was it meant to accomplish? Duds isn’t talking; in fact, he seems terrified, and rightly so. Within an hour of his release, he is found stabbed to death in an alley.

Campion notices one thing that helped Meg mistake Duds for her husband. He is wearing Martin’s distinctive coat. When Campion repairs to the unusual household of old Canon Avril, Meg’s father and Campion’s uncle, to investigate, he finds the coat was recently in the house. How could it have fallen into the imposter’s hands?

Soon the police find a connection between this case and the escape from jail of a very dangerous man, who calls himself John Havoc. Havoc murdered an eminent physician to escape and subsequently killed three people trying to break into the law office that handled Martin Elginbrodde’s estate. He did not escape, though, early enough to have killed Duds.

In the meantime, Geoffrey Levett is missing.

The plot of this novel, like many of those from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, is absurd. However, the novel is notable for its strong and vivid characterizations—of one of fiction’s first sociopaths as well as of the many unusual and delightful characters living in Canon Avril’s house. Campion himself remains a quiet character instead of being a presence such as Lord Peter Wimsey or any of Christie’s detectives.

Day 447: To Marry an English Lord: Tales of Wealth and Marriage, Sex and Snobbery

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Cover for To Marry an English LordTo Marry an English Lord is entertaining enough, if certainly holding few surprises for those of us who read about this era. It is about the influx of wealthy American girls as brides into England beginning after the American Civil War and ending shortly after the end of the Edwardian era. First, girls were traveling with their mothers to Europe in search of a titled husband, followed by a flood of not-so-eligible young men over to the U.S. after the discovery of gold in them-thar hills (not the metallic kind, although some of the girls’ fathers’ fortunes were made that way).

The main portion of the text focuses on the fates of several girls—Consuelo Yznaga, who became the unhappily married Duchess of Manchester is one—who were among the first to travel to Europe in search of a suitable match. The book refers to them as the Buccaneers, a reference to Edith Wharton’s novel by the same name and on the same subject. The book covers some of the later marriages as well and explains how the trend changed over time. It provides snippets of details about life in a stately home or at court and about the stuffy societal structures in old New York.

The material is given an interesting presentation, with plenty of sidebars, inset photos, double-page spreads set in the flow of a chapter—more like a magazine or a textbook. This approach occasionally made me feel as if it was designed for someone with attention deficit disorder. It looks attractive but is hard to read coherently, and sometimes there is an unfortunate effect. For example, I had just finished reading about the death of Edward VII and its impact on society when I turned the page to read about his refusal to recognize the Marlboroughs after their divorce.

Although the book seems to take the position that girls went willingly into this search for and bagging of their titled husbands because of their own ambitions, Edith Wharton, in most of her novels that deal with this subject (with the exception of The Custom of the Country), rather regards them more as lambs to the slaughter.

I don’t think anyone will get a deep understanding of the period from this book, which is rife with generalizations, but if you’re looking for an entertaining presentation of a plethora of little details, it is a fun book to read. One big complaint for me is that many of the inset pictures are reduced to such a small size, in the interest of the layout, that it is impossible for me to tell what I’m looking at, particularly for interior shots of the various houses.

Day 446: Holiday Story! Spirit of Steamboat

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Cover for Spirit of SteamboatWhen Craig Johnson was asked to write a Walt Longmire story for Christmas, he got a little carried away and wrote a novella, Spirit of Steamboat.

A strange oriental woman shows up at the Sheriff’s Office in Durant on Christmas Eve and asks to speak to the sheriff. When Walt comes out to see her, she asks if he recognizes her and also wants to meet the previous sheriff. A mystified Walt takes her to see old Lucian Connelly at the rest home, to whom she says one word, “Steamboat.”

The story returns 25 years to another Christmas Eve. Walt has just become sheriff, and he receives a call that a helicopter is bringing in a child who has been injured and burned in a car accident. If she can’t be flown to Denver immediately for burn treatment, she will die. Unfortunately, Wyoming is in the midst of a violent blizzard, and the airport doesn’t have a plane big enough to fly in the storm.

Well, it has one, but no one to fly the old B-25 bomber named Steamboat, which is in questionable condition. Walt rousts out Lucius, a former World War II pilot who took part in the Doolittle Raid. Because Lucius only has one leg, he needs a copilot, so Julie Leurman comes along, a pilot certainly, but not one certified to fly that class of planes. When the helicopter arrives with the girl and her grandmother, the EMT refuses to come, so Walt enlists the terrified Dr. Isaac Bloomfield to care for the girl during the flight. Although everyone at the airport thinks they are insane, soon the six of them are aloft.

This novella is not a mystery but a straight adventure story. Although the outcome is never in question given the beginning of the book, it is still quite exciting, with medical emergencies, equipment problems, and horrible weather conditions. The novella also contains nuggets of information about WW II era planes and about Steamboat, the emblem of Wyoming, a famous rodeo bronc for which the plane is named. This is a quick, enjoyable read containing a bit of sentiment for the holidays.