Monthly Archives: December 2014

The Power of “No–and furthermore. . . .”

29 Monday Dec 2014

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Raymond Chandler once famously advised writers that if their story lacked tension, introduce a man with a gun.

This is another way of telling your protagonist, “Think you’re going to get what you want? Forget it.” Or, as I remarked in my last post (December 22, “Dance or Dangle?”), “No, you’re not going to get it–and furthermore, you’re in even greater trouble than you thought.”

Not only thrillers benefit from the “no–and furthermore.” Every novel I’ve praised on this blog, no matter what genre, succeeds in part because the author has used this powerful technique to its fullest. Every one I’ve disliked fails because the author either presented no credible barriers for the protagonist to overcome or made them too easy. It’s called constantly raising the stakes, and it’s not as simple as it sounds.

Sure, you can make the mountain too tall to climb, the door too thick to break down, the road too dark to travel, or the weather too miserable to allow watching the bad guys. You can have the villain get to the gold first or seduce the woman who was really meant to be with the hero. All these may be useful, even necessary.

But I think raising the emotional stakes counts a lot more. What the characters believe, their dearest principles, must be threatened. The threat shouldn’t only be external, as with the man with the gun; but internal, as with what the character feels about herself. Those feelings usually include the fallout of shifting perceptions, when the character realizes he’s been lying to himself or hurt someone. That can be as potent, if not more, than any physical apocalypse.

Consider the following examples. In The Lie, Daniel, a soldier returning from the First World War, dreams of being reunited with his first love, whom he’s known all his life. Does he manage? No. He finds out that in his absence, she’s married, had a child, and been widowed. Author Helen Dunmore further complicates this already awkward triangle by making the late husband a soldier too, so that Daniel has to sympathize with him, even as he resents the rivalry.

In Blood & Beauty, as soon as Lucrezia Borgia finds a man who truly cares for her–as opposed to using her as a sexual or political object–her father and brother contrive to get rid of him. Sarah Dunant uses these brutal setbacks to disillusion Lucrezia about her male relatives (whom she’s always worshiped), the possibility of love, and her place in the world.

Thomas Keneally’s Daughters of Mars are sisters in blood and profession, as nurses who may or may not have hastened their mother’s death to relieve her sufferings from cancer. The younger sister, Sally, has always wanted to be closer to the elder, Naomi. But they’ll forever be estranged unless and until they can speak of what happened to their mother–and of course, they can’t.

Conclusion? I find that the books that have the most emotionally powerful “no–and furthermores” feel inherently important, whereas those that don’t fail to move me. The books I put aside are generally those whose protagonists face external barriers that are merely circumstantial and exert too little pull.

What do you think? What books compel you that way, or don’t?

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copies of these books from the public library.

More fine print: This week, I’m on vacation, so will post only once.

Dance or Dangle?

22 Monday Dec 2014

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Review: The Day of Atonement, by David Liss
Random House, 2014. 365 pp. $28

“Only a few hours in Lisbon, without even setting foot on land, and I had set things in motion,” says Sebastian Foxx, the protagonist of this revenge tale, set in 1745. “These people–my enemies–already danced upon my string. Unless I dangled upon their rope. That was also a possibility.”

It’s an accurate judgment, and for virtually the entire novel, neither Sebastian nor the reader can ever be sure whether a dance or a dangle is taking place, or who’s in control. All you do know is that Sebastian isn’t who he says he is, and that merely by entering Lisbon, he may be arrested, tortured, and killed any hour. Ditto the people he’s trying to help.

His real name is Sebastião Raposa, and to the Inquisition, he’s a heretic. Yes, the Inquisition still rules in 1745, and, as described in The Day of Atonement, its agents are a frighteningly efficient eighteenth-century Gestapo, except that they wear priestly robes instead of leather coats and trilbys. Their goal is to rid the city of New Christians–families that converted from Judaism generations before but forever suspect as nonbelievers–and to seize their property. The accusations are false, but that doesn’t matter. Under torture, the victim confesses and names accomplices.

Seal of the Inquisition. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Seal of the Inquisition. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

When Sebastião was thirteen, someone had heard that his family was saving up money to flee this impossible trap, and charged them with heresy. Sebastião’s parents spirited him out of the country, but they remained to endure imprisonment and death. He landed in England, under the care and tutelage of Benjamin Weaver, former pugilist and current thief hunter, whom Liss fans know from other novels.

Now, as Sebastian Foxx, the young man has returned to his forefathers’ Jewish faith, and, in Lisbon, to kill his family’s accusers and the Inquisitor responsible for their deaths. He also dreams of finding Gabriela, his first love, whose family was denounced at the same time as his, and to return to England with her. What a mad, pointless scheme; as an old Lisbon friend tells him, taking on the Inquisition “is like taking revenge against the ocean to avenge a drowning.”

However, Sebastian doesn’t care what happens to him and feels no fear (or much of anything else), so numbed is he by his emotional losses. Fueled by fury, he’s a dangerous rival, capable of violence to a degree that startles everyone, even his mentor.

Nevertheless, he also means to do right, which makes The Day of Atonement a moral tale as well as a thriller, an exploration of the use and misuse of violence. While trying to decide who’s a villain, he acquires more victims to rescue, who also suffer as a result, giving him further sins to expiate. Hence the title: Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, requires more than fasting, prayer, and reflection. To obtain forgiveness, the penitent must seek it from the person he has wronged. Sebastian believes that if he can atone properly–free himself of his anger and right great wrongs–he can be whole again.

I like this setup, and Liss carries its promise to conclusion. He knows how to string out a confrontation, letting the tension rise and fall, only to rise again, in a way you hadn’t anticipated. I think of this as a kind of “no–and furthermore ,” in which a character supposes he’s getting somewhere, only to find out he’s not–and, furthermore, winds up in worse trouble. Whether it’s a twist of circumstance, a betrayal, or an unexpected task to fulfill, Liss piles on the “no–and furthermores” until you have no idea what’s flying, precisely Sebastian’s viewpoint.

A couple of the violent scenes (and there are many) seem Hollywood to me, and Sebastian passes through an emotional transition or two that appear too easy. Even so, of the six David Liss novels I’ve read, The Day of Atonement is my favorite since The Whiskey Rebels (2008).

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

More fine print: This week and next, I’ll be on vacation, so will post only once each week.

The Just and Unjust

15 Monday Dec 2014

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Review: Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France, by Caroline Moorehead

HarperCollins, 2014. 374 pp. $28

This is an important, necessary work of history that reads like a novel, a tale of courage, altruism, deceit, and murder whose echoes resound more than seventy years after the fact. In telling how a cluster of French villages resisted German occupation during World War II, Village of Secrets also grasps the larger context of a humiliated, divided nation largely silent in the face of outrageous crimes.

Moorehead describes the extent to which the French police, the Vichy government, and private citizens went out of their way to catch, kill, or deport Jews, their zeal astonishing the Germans, who had, often, not even ordered these measures. As a historian who has researched Occupied France, I’ve never seen so concise and readable an account of these events.

Prisoners at Gurs detention camp, from which many thousands were deported. Gurs, France, ca. April 1941. Courtesy U.S. Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.

Prisoners at Gurs detention camp, from which many thousands were deported. Gurs, France, ca. April 1941. Courtesy U.S. Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.

Most of the narrative, however, concerns an extraordinary effort to protect hundreds of Jews, usually (but not always) children whose parents had already been sent to Auschwitz, and a smaller number of resisters, Freemasons, and Communist veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Incredibly, the rescuers did more than that, often extracting these people from holding camps that supplied the cargo for deportation trains. Some rescuers were Jewish social workers using false papers; many others were their Christian counterparts. In both cases, they funneled refugees to a remote plateau in the southern Massif Central, a largely Protestant enclave, where pastors and educators helped disperse them to farms and school dormitories. There, they assumed new identities, safeguarded, remarkably, by the villagers’ silence.

The main village, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, has been honored by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as Righteous Among the Nations, an extremely rare honor, and is celebrated within France. To her credit, however, Moorehead looks past these accolades; she has no interest in moral uplift or easy judgments. From her detailed account, based heavily on interviews with survivors, both rescuers and victims come across as complex, flawed people. She sifts conflicting evidence to decide when appearances deceive or the principals lied, whether to others or themselves. My favorite parts were her accounts of how the rescued Jews coped (or didn’t), and how their hosts treated them. In all the Holocaust literature I know, I’ve never read anything like it.

That said, I wish that Moorehead had taken greater care with a few details. Her research was exhaustive, but her footnotes are sketchy, which makes it harder to use her sources or even know what they are in a given context. It also compromises her devotion to truth-telling–not that I have any reason to dispute what she says, but that she fails to nail it down. For instance, the role of Pierre Laval, Vichy’s chief politician, remains controversial in some quarters, as does his execution for treason after the war. From what I’ve read, he deserved it, but solid evidence is always useful, and though Moorehead quotes at least two damaging statements, she provides no source.

I’d have also liked discussion of how the Jews being sheltered felt about their religion. I gather that few continued to practice, likely for security reasons, if no other. But surely they had feelings about abandoning their faith, and, for the children, whether that meant they had separated themselves still further from the parents they had lost.

Nevertheless, I don’t mean to detract from Village of Secrets, a terrific book and a worthy addition to the ever-growing body of work on the Holocaust.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Terror, Within and Without

11 Thursday Dec 2014

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Review: City of Women, by David R. Gillham
Putnam, 2012. 385 pp. $26.

I’ve never been tempted to read a book because of a cover blurb, and I wish publishers would scrap the whole idea. Everybody knows that blurbs happen because the editor or author has a friend who has a friend, and that many recognized writers are pleased to say a few kind words about a new book, because someone once did that for them.

So I’ve never been tempted, until now. Did it work out? Half and half.

Alan Furst, master of the World War II thriller, offers that City of Women faithfully re-creates wartime Berlin–and that it does, in style. You can smell the ersatz tobacco, taste the spongy potatoes, and, most important, feel the intense claustrophobia, to escape which, people spend afternoons at sickeningly dreadful propaganda movies. Terror wears down Berliners, whether from the RAF bombers that blast away on clear nights, or the Gestapo, and I probably don’t have to tell you which they fear more.

The Reichstag, or German parliament, after a bombing raid. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

The Reichstag, or German parliament, after a bombing raid. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Except for soldiers on leave, Berlin is indeed a city of women, elevated on the Nazi pedestal and shamelessly exploited at the same time. They are purportedly the lifeblood of the Reich, but prison or deportation await if they fail to report a neighbor’s slackness, show too little enthusiasm for clothing drives for the Eastern Front, or utter a syllable that may be construed as defeatist.

What rich, unusual material for a thriller, and Gillham begins well. Sigrid Schröder, a model wife with a part-time job at the patent office and a husband fighting in Russia, enters a passionate affair with a Jewish man. Throw in Sigrid’s mother-in-law from hell, with whom she shares a too-tiny apartment; a busybody who reports on her neighbors; and the existence Sigrid leads, starved of warmth, food, or purpose, and you have a great premise.

I like how Gillham portrays Sigrid, especially how she grows throughout the novel, and the window on her gritty, drab life held my attention. However, about halfway through, City of Women loses steam, having failed to keep its promises. Improbabilities multiply, and though I continued reading just to see how the story resolved, as a thriller, it’s flat.

For one thing, I find it hard to believe that Sigrid’s in danger, though enemies abound who constantly threaten her. The plot contains many surprises, but maybe fewer than the author intended, and rarely the kind that put Sigrid in worse trouble. Others may suffer, but not her. What trouble she has, she skates through, often thanks to guardian angels whose helpfulness left me scratching my head. Too many secrets are divulged for no apparent reason–other than that the reader needs to know?–and without serious consequence.

Gillham writes well, well enough to do better. He knows his historical ground, how to deploy telling detail, and craft tense dialogue. The beginning jumps around confusingly, but once he gets that squared away, the story moves smoothly–until the end, when it becomes bumpy once more. In his acknowledgments, he thanks his editor, whom he says went through the manuscript line by line, implying how unusual that is these days, a sad truth. But I think she missed quite a bit, most obviously where the story shakes and shudders, and the italics rattle like loose screws; nobody can speak two lines without grating on your nerves for emphasis.

That said, Gillham has talent, and I suspect what holds him back in City of Women is a lack of confidence, whether in himself, his readers, or both. I hope his next novel shows a surer hand, because if it does, it will be fine indeed.

Blood and Honor

08 Monday Dec 2014

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Review: Child of Vengeance, by David Kirk
Doubleday, 2013. 321 pp. $26

Like his father before him, Bennosuke trains to be a samurai, a killing machine sworn to carry out his lord’s commands, no matter how vain, narrow, or immoral they may be. To fail means dishonor, redeemable only through suppuku, ritual suicide; but success means stifling compassion, sensitivity, trust, or emotional connection.

General Akashi Gidayu preparing to commit Seppuku after losing a battle for his master in 1582. He had just written his death poem. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

General Akashi Gidayu preparing to commit seppuku after losing a battle for his master in 1582. He has just written his death poem. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Remarkably for a thirteen-year-old boy, or, as David Kirk so vividly describes, just about anyone in seventeenth-century Japan, Bennosuke rebels against this choice. Following his father’s instructions but also the teachings of his uncle, a monk who raised him during long years of parental absence, the boy believes he can be a loyal samurai and a moral, righteous, feeling man.

Bennosuke’s inner struggle is the premise, but there’s as much action as introspection here. Kirk sets Bennosuke’s search within the context of outward battles, whether between father and uncle for the boy’s soul and future, against enemies who bait father and son into mortal combat, or to survive the political tempests of feudal Japan.

I have no patience for hidebound warrior codes or the concept of killing to save face, but I read Child of Vengeance despite its subject matter. I’m glad I did. Not only does Kirk know his ground and how to make it coherent and understandable, he presents moral dilemmas inherent in the samurai way of life. Bennosuke never asks himself whether he’d have preferred to be a peasant, but the story plumbs both sides of this question.

The peasant, forbidden to bear arms, will never have to defend his honor–it’s assumed he has none–nor go to war. However, war will come to him, and he pays, either in taxes or by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Is it better to be able to defend yourself, even in someone else’s service? Is the right to bear arms, and the duty that goes with it, a freedom or a curse? The only characters Bennosuke meets who think for themselves, starting with his uncle, aren’t samurai–samurai can’t afford that luxury. So who’s happier in the end, warrior or peasant?

There’s never a dull moment here, and Kirk writes with psychological insight, always a pleasure. However, too often, he tells you what the characters feel–that old devil explanation, again–and Bennosuke’s insights toward the end seem unearned, as if the author has gotten ahead of his character’s development. Sometimes, too, the language feels laden with portent or skating just this side of cliché. Consider this passage:

History is changed by the smallest of things; a single drop of rain, say, is blown by a freak gust of wind into the eyes of a ship’s captain, so that in the blink that follows he misses the sign of the reef ahead. . . . What left Arima’s mouth was no more than a pale green gob of phlegm, but within it was the catalyst that put fire in Bennosuke’s soul.

I like the images, yet I’ve read this before in other guises. Maybe the weak point is that the Arima in the passage fights for an archvillain clan, who–unlike anyone else in the novel–show little depth.

But these are relatively small issues, and I believe David Kirk will write better novels. Meanwhile, Child of Vengeance is worth your time.

Once Upon a Lifetime Dreary

04 Thursday Dec 2014

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Q: How many masochists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Forget it. They’re too busy sticking their fingers in the bulb sockets.

If you can imagine a novel like this, so beautifully written that you feel the haunting warmth of the dead bulb, see the sinuous fingers extend toward the naked contacts, and sense the exquisite torture as the current jolts the body–well, you’ve just imagined how I felt reading The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor (Viking, 2002).

Since Trevor’s a writer whose reputation reaches far beyond his native Ireland (he’s been mentioned as a Nobel candidate), I actually finished the book, wanting to know what it was that bothered me.

My trouble isn’t that the novel is bleak, or that all the characters suffer great pain. By itself, that doesn’t put me off, and if terrible sadness were the bane of readable fiction, that would eliminate just about all Russian literature and much of Irish, for starters. In fact, I’m still scratching my head over a complaint I heard in a book group many years ago. A woman dismissed James Joyce’s Dubliners, because, she said, “The stories are all so depressing.”

Maybe they are, but Joyce gives the reader–at least, this reader–something to hold on to. The characters have dreams and try to fulfill them, but when they fail, I feel for them, recognizing their frailties as my own. In Lucy Gault, I had nothing to hold on to, so the beautiful prose, the subtle moments carefully observed, and the pain of being human didn’t reach me.

Let’s start with the premise, which must be plausible if the novel is to strike a chord. See what you think of this:

With civil war roiling Ireland in the early 1920s, a former army captain takes a rifle to three prowlers outside his seafront home one night, and foils what seems to have been an arson attempt. Fearing for his family’s safety–his wife is English, and they have a nine-year-old daughter, the Lucy of the title–Captain Gault decides to seek exile in England. But the parents won’t tell Lucy why they’re moving, thinking it better not to frighten her. Their silence costs dearly, for she runs off, determined to stay in the place she loves, misinterpreting the departure as a capricious, heartless act aimed at her.

Would the Gaults really have kept silent, especially after Lucy objects? Maybe. Would they then, after she fails to show up, believe so readily that she drowned, leave as quickly as they do, and go into exile in Italy, cutting off all contact? I doubt it. I think they’d have stayed put, hoping against hope that Lucy survived–which, in fact, she does–and daring the nationalist goons to do their worst, believing that they’d already lost everything.

Not to mention that the captain had survived the Great War, having fought at Passchendaele, no less. Would he really have bolted because a trio of inept terrorists had poisoned his dogs and skedaddled at the first shot? And if, by some stretch, the Gaults did leave Ireland, why didn’t they write the caretakers staying on the property, just–well, just because that’s something people do? Instead, over the course of years–make that decades–Captain Gault seals and stamps several letters home, but sends none, just another in a series of self-inflicted wounds with which it becomes harder to feel sympathy.

For these characters, changing a lightbulb would have been showing great initiative, never mind struggling against their predicament. It wouldn’t have taken much effort, either, to dispel their sorrow (ending the thin story). But they have no more dreams, even, no desires, just play out their lives in emptiness. Where’s the novel in that?

Nowhere to Turn

01 Monday Dec 2014

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Review: The Devil in the Marshalsea, by Antonia Hodgson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. $15.

Given a choice, anyone would prefer the harshest desert or most savage jungle to this place. But it’s 1727, a cruel era, in London, a hard city, and the inmates of the Marshalsea prison have no choice: They owe money and must remain until their debts are paid. If they die, as many do, the prison governor lets the rats devour the corpses, until the bereaved relatives pay him a fee.

Marshalsea, as it was in 1773. Charles Dickens later wrote about it in Little Dorrit; his family had stayed there. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Marshalsea, as it was in 1773. Charles Dickens later wrote about it in Little Dorrit; his family had stayed there. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

What’s more, those who still live must pay weekly rent or else be thrown into the Common Side, where the sick and penniless are crammed into filth-ridden, pestilential hovels, and none survive for long. Extorting debtors is therefore lucrative business, and William Acton, governor of the Marshalsea, has been known to whip inmates to death, even young children, to instill fear and obedience.

Into this hell-hole drops Thomas Hawkins, a young man who has found brothels and gaming tables more to his taste than divinity studies at Oxford. Tom has fallen on hard luck, having just been robbed of money with which he’d planned to repay his debt. That would be an ordinary tale, hardly worth notice at the Marshalsea, except that he bears an uncanny resemblance to a Captain Roberts, an inmate just found hanged. So Tom becomes the object of intense interest, more so when the only way he can save himself is to learn the truth behind Roberts’s death, a mystery whose investigation is likely to cost him his life.

What a brilliant setup, with enemies on every side, colossal stakes, victims of gross injustice, unseen motives, secrets worth lives, and dire penalties for trusting the wrong confidant. But Hodgson doesn’t stop there in this excellent novel, all the more impressive for being her first.

To begin with, she firmly establishes the prison milieu, where information is readily tradable for coins or favors that may extend life or make it slightly more bearable. This is the currency in which Tom must barter, and as a newcomer, he makes mistakes.

But it’s the title character in The Devil in the Marshalsea who steals the show. Samuel Fleet is a reputed spy, assassin, mastermind, and the only prisoner not in debt–he’s there for publishing seditious pamphlets. He’s also the prime suspect in Roberts’s death, which occurred in Fleet’s room–where, by the way, Tom is staying, at his host’s expense. A character Balzac would have loved, quicker and more devious than anyone else, Fleet defends his philosophy to Tom:

If you wish to survive in this gaol . . . in this world, then you must make people believe that you are the most ruthless, calculating, treacherous man they know. They must believe that you are capable of anything–the worst imaginable outrages.

As you may have gathered, surprises abound in this novel, yet, toward the end, I had an inkling of the solution. It didn’t bother me, because it wasn’t obvious, and the reversals came thick and fast, so I can’t say I really knew in my bones what would happen. What I minded more, though, were Hodgson’s occasional “little did I know” declarations in Tom’s voice, which undercut a tight, tense narrative. I never like that technique, unless it’s used once, at the very beginning.

But these are quibbles. The Devil in the Marshalsea is worth your time–and believe me, you won’t want to put it down.