Day 228: The Night Circus

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Cover for The Night CircusIt is the mid-19th century. Prospero the Enchanter raises his daughter Celia Bowen as if she were an apprentice magician, only it is not magic she is working. Continuing an ancient disagreement, Prospero challenges the man in the gray suit to a competition–his daughter against any opponent. So, the man in the gray suit takes a young boy out of an orphanage.

Both children grow up training for this elusive competition, and when they are adults, the man in the gray suit collaborates in creating the Night Circus and sends his protégé Marco to work for its designer. Soon Celia is employed by the circus as an illusionist, and Celia and Marco take up the competition with no understanding of its rules. Celia doesn’t even know who her opponent is.

The Night Circus is a marvelous place, all white and black and gray, constantly growing and changing. It becomes the venue for and creation of the competition.

The Night Circus has been extremely popular, and it seemed like it was right down my alley. However, although it is entertaining enough and is certainly based on an original idea, at some point my interest began flagging.

I think one major problem of the novel is that we are constantly told how wonderful the circus is, but Erin Morgenstern fails to describe it in a compelling way. Descriptions are vague instead of specific enough for readers to imagine a scene. In two or three consecutive pages, for example, I just happened to notice that Morgenstern used the word “elaborate” five or six times with no attempt to describe each object beyond that word. The details she does divulge don’t sound as if they would be that interesting, and frankly, a black, white, and gray circus seems to be the invention of a person more concerned with style than enchantment. An important part of a circus is the vibrancy of color. I felt no sense of wonder, was never surprised or beguiled, and I was occasionally confused, especially concerning the “wonderful coalescence” described in one scene. What does that mean? Although the competition turns out to be about life and death, I also never felt any sense of danger.

Another problem for me is the fable-like quality of the novel, which treats the characters more emblematically than as real people. You feel some sympathy for Celia and Marco, but you don’t know what they are like. Overall, I found the novel mildly disappointing.

Day 227: At Bertram’s Hotel

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Cover for At Bertram's HotelMiss Marple’s nieces and nephews don’t have much luck sending her off for a rest. At her niece’s expense, she is spending a week at Bertram’s Hotel, a place she remembers from her childhood. Although at first the hotel seems exactly the same as it was when she was young, Edwardian in appearance and yet offering every comfort despite the intercession of the war, Miss Marple can’t help feeling something isn’t right.

Another guest at the hotel is the dashing Bess Sedgwick, who has lived a life of excitement and glamor. By coincidence, her daughter Elvira, whom she deserted at the age of two, also is staying there. Soon Miss Marple has spotted them meeting separately with the notorious race car driver Ladislaus Malinkowski.

Befuddled Canon Pennyfeather goes to the airport to fly to his conference in Switzerland on the wrong day. Returning unexpectedly to his room at Bertram’s, he opens the door to find–something–but is knocked out and disappears.

In the meantime Chief Inspector Davy is investigating a huge crime network responsible for a series of robberies. In two of the incidents a witness claimed to see a reputable citizen who was actually somewhere far away from the crime at the time, but both of these men were staying at Bertram’s Hotel.

And soon there is a murder to solve. As with much of Agatha Christie’s work, the plot is overcomplicated and somewhat silly. Still, At Bertram’s Hotel is a lot of fun.

Day 226: I Curse the River of Time

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Cover for I Curse the River of TimeI Curse the River of Time is a sad book about Arvid Jansen, a man trying to cross a divide between himself and his dying mother. At the same time his marriage is failing and the Berlin Wall is coming down. Things are coming to an end in his life.

Jansen remembers decisions he made, particularly the one to leave university and join the Communist party. As the wall falls, he considers his loss of faith in the party. 

In contemplating his failing marriage, he also remembers his courtship of a young girl, although it is not clear whether he is thinking about his wife. He goes to his mother’s home country of Denmark, to a beach house where his family spent the summers, and recalls his childhood bond with his mother.

The novel is moody and inconclusive, and for some reason I kept expecting it to become sinister, although it did not. Even though the novel is focused around his attempts to reconcile with his mother (although that is perhaps not the correct word since there has not been a falling out–she is simply cold and unresponsive to him), it seems to me that Jansen thinks about her too much, is too obsessed with her.

The writing is excellent, spare but full of details. However, the entire feel of the novel is tenuous. There does not seem to be much to fasten onto.

Day 225: The Devil All the Time

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Cover for The Devil All the TimeTruly gritty noir seems to come out of rural settings these days instead of the city. Such is the case with The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock.

Arvin Russell is having a tough childhood in the backwoods town of Meade in southern Ohio. His mother is dying of cancer, and his grief-crazed father Willard has set up a “praying log” where he sacrifices animals and makes Arvin pray for hours on end. When his mother dies, his father commits suicide by hanging himself at the praying log.

Back in Willard Russell’s home town of Coal Creek, Virginia, Brother Roy Laferty is a preacher who eats bugs for the glory of God and travels around with his crippled friend Theodore, a gay pedophile. Roy marries Helen, the woman Willard’s mother wanted him to marry, but later, egged on by Theodore, he murders her. The two start off on a spree of serial killing.

As Arvin grows up in Coal Creek with his grandmother, another couple from Meade haunts the highways of the midwest. Carl and Sandy Henderson pick up hitchhiking men. Carl has Sandy seduce them so that he can murder them and take photographs of Sandy with their bodies.

Lee Bodecker, the policeman who accompanied Arvin back to his father’s body when he was a boy, is now the corrupt sheriff of Meade, Ohio. He knows his sister Sandy is a prostitute but is unaware of her more sinister activities with Carl.

Now grown, Arvin has spent his high school years protecting his unattractive, devout cousin Leonora from the taunts of his school fellows. The town is excited because of the arrival of the new preacher, Preston Teagardin, a nephew of the dedicated Reverend Sykes. But Teagardin is not quite as dedicated as his uncle, and he also has an eye for the young girls. He decides that a naive, religious girl might be a good place to start.

The fates of all these people are soon to converge in a way that won’t be pretty. The flavor of the grotesque and perverse echoes of Flannery O’Connor and other Southern Gothic writers. With hardly a redeeming character to be found, we have to wonder if Pollock is simply revelling in his ability to produce such depravity.

Day 224: The Happy Foreigner

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Cover for The Happy ForeignerThe Happy Foreigner by Enid Bagnold is interesting as a record of conditions in France right after World War I. In fact, at the time of its publication (1920), it was lauded for its journalistic qualities. The book is almost certainly quasi-autobiographical, although it was published as fiction.

Fanny is a British girl who volunteers to drive for the French army right after the war. In many places the villages are completely destroyed, and very little food is available. The driving is difficult and hazardous. Fanny and the other girls live in a shack with paper-thin walls, a leaky roof, and mud on the floor, and sleep on stretchers supported by sawhorses. From there, she is transferred closer to Germany, where she lives more comfortably in a town with more gaeity. It is ironic that the Germans seem to be in better shape economically and their towns less ravaged after the war than the French.

As well as a true depiction of the time and place, the novel is about the entrance of women into areas of work that had previously belonged solely to men. When Fanny first enters the dining room of an underground fortress in Verdun, her second posting, all talk ceases, as most of the men have not seen a woman in years. Later when she is assigned to drive for a Russian Colonel, she must address his doubts about her capabilities before he will let her drive.

Fanny meets a French officer, Julien, and they fall in love, but their relationship is one of the oddest things in this unusual, almost telegraphically written book. They are both so leery of each other that their dealings with each other are very tenuous.

I was a little disappointed that Bagnold chose to anchor this tale around a romance, no matter how odd, as it seemed a hackneyed idea, but I suppose that given the circumstances of just a few women among a huge number of men, that was an inevitable choice.

Day 223: 206 Bones

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Cover for 206 BonesPerhaps I am outgrowing Kathy Reichs’ Tempe Brennan series because I don’t pick them up as often as I used to, but I still occasionally enjoy the novels about the forensic anthropologist who shares her work time between Montreal and her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. At the beginning of 206 Bones, Brennan wakes up buried in a tunnel and most of the book is a flashback.

On a case in Chicago with her on-again, off-again romantic partner Andrew Ryan of the Sûreté du Québec, Brennan is accused of botching the autopsy of a Canadian heiress named Rose Jurmain. Brennan eventually realizes that someone in the Montreal office is sabotaging her career by replacing bones in her lab. Tempe begins to suspect that the heiress’s death is linked to that of three more women on Canada, but she is impeded in her investigations by the drama at her workplace.

I find the Tempe Brennan books that take place in Montreal more interesting than those in Charlotte for some reason, perhaps because they seem more atmospheric. The Tempe Brennan series is the very lightest of mystery reading, but the books are rapidly turning into action novels rather than the interesting explorations in forensics that they started out to be.

Day 222: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

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Cover for The Hare with Amber EyesBest Book of the Week!

In 1994, the world-class ceramics artist Edmund de Waal inherited a collection of 264 netsuke from his great uncle Ignace (Iggie). De Waal decided to trace the history of the netsuke from the time they came into his family, and in doing so, to trace the history of the family itself and the times they lived in. The result is a fascinating combination of memoir, history, art history, and collection of musings on related topics, The Hare with Amber Eyes.

Charles Ephrussi originally purchased the netsuke in Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Ephrussis were at that time a wealthy family of bankers, originally from Odessa, who in previous generations had expanded their offices to Vienna and from there to Paris. Charles Ephrussi was not a banker but a noted art collector and critic, friend of Impressionists such as Degas and Manet, and one of the two models Proust used for his character Charles Swann.

De Waal attempts to understand Charles through an examination of his writings and possessions and through events in his time, particularly the effect of the Dreyfuss case on antisemitism in France. Charles’s work in art was an important part of his life, and in this section of the book I was struck by the connection de Waal makes between Japonisme–the interest in and collection of Japanese artifacts, with their focus on nature and everyday life–and the rise of Impressionism, which was considered revolutionary partly because of its focus on nature and everyday life instead of “noble” subject matter such as historical scenes or stories from the Bible or mythology.

In 1899, Charles sent the netsuke to Vienna as a wedding present for his younger cousin Viktor Ephrussi, de Waal’s great grandfather and eventual head of the Ephrussi bank in Vienna. De Waal traced what he could of the life of Viktor and his family, this story culminating shortly after the dual terrors of the Anschluss and Kristalnacht. During this time, everything that this branch of the family owned was confiscated by the Gestapo. In these pages of the book, de Waal does a better job of conveying the fears and anxieties of those times than any of the recent books I have read.

De Waal’s grandmother Elisabeth recovered the netsuke after the war. How they returned to the family is an incredible story that I will not reveal. Shortly after she returned to England with them, where some of the family had made their home, they traveled to post-war Japan with de Waal’s great uncle Iggie.

I have just supplied the barest outline of the fate of the netsuke, which provides a focus for de Waal’s investigations and musings, but the family’s story and the story of their times is fascinating and imaginatively reconstructed. The book is at once a meditation on and enthralling depiction of the life and times of an extraordinary family.

Day 221: The Postmistress

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Cover for The PostmistressIn The Postmistress, Frankie Bard is a radio reporter working with Edward R. Murrow in London at the beginning of World War II. She meets an American doctor during the Blitz who has left his new wife at home to come help in London, inspired by Frankie’s broadcasts. He gives her a letter for his wife right before he is hit by a car and killed.

Instead of mailing the letter, Frankie carries it around Europe for three months while she interviews Jews who are fleeing their countries. All that time, the wife, Emma Trask, doesn’t hear from her husband and is not notified of his death. Frankie also witnesses the murders of innocent people by Nazis and never reports them. She just goes home.

In the doctor’s small Massachusetts home town, the postmistress is Iris James. She doesn’t seem to be that important a character, although the book surrounds her with this great mystique that she is the center of the village because she knows all its secrets. What she actually does is withhold a letter to Emma from Dr. Trask’s landlady saying that he has disappeared, and she does this because Emma is pregnant.

I felt this book was entirely frustrating, because I found the characters’ actions inexplicable. What kind of person carries a letter for someone else around in her pocket for three months without mailing it? What kind of reporter witnesses the deaths of innocent people and doesn’t tell anyone about them? A postmistress who withholds a letter from its recipient is disobeying federal law, and I suggest that the upright, responsible Iris wouldn’t think of doing that, let alone reading the letter in the first place. And who would decide it is better for a wife to be left in limbo for years? Trask has already deserted her for the war with very little explanation, which is traumatic enough.

Everything pivotal in this novel seems like a contrivance to me. In addition, the novel that is supposed to be about the postmistress gets hijacked by the reporter, whose actions throughout are irrational. I also feel as though too little attention is paid to the details of life during the war. Frankie’s journey to the continent during the height of German occupation seems to be completed with very little difficulty, and in record time. One reader on Amazon points out that Frankie and her London roommate Harriet have a refrigerator in the room, even though they were uncommon in England in the 1940’s. In other respects, the characters seem oddly untouched by the war. Although Sarah Blake wrote another novel that I enjoyed very much, Grange House, I cannot recommend The Postmistress.