Monthly Archives: January 2015

“A Promising Future”: Jack of Spies, by David Downing

29 Thursday Jan 2015

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Review: Jack of Spies, by David Downing
Soho, 2014. 338 pp. $28

“The automobile business,” muses Jack McColl, the engaging British protagonist of this excellent thriller, “was not what it had been even two years before. . . . Spying, on the other hand, seemed an occupation with a promising future.”

If nothing else, Jack is prescient, for the year is 1913, and the infant secret services of Britain and Germany are gearing up for a war of which most Europeans have no inkling. It will be a global war, he senses, and indeed, his first assignment is to track German warships that have put in at Tsingtau, a German colony in China with its requisite population of spies. Jack’s being watched more carefully than he knows.

The harbor at Tsingtau, 1912. (Courtesy Bundesarchiv, Bild 116-424-127 / CC-BY-SA)

The harbor at Tsingtau, 1912. (Courtesy Bundesarchiv, Bild 116-424-127 / CC-BY-SA)

But he enjoys a dash of danger. Further, he realizes that selling luxury automobiles, his main job, will soon go the way of the dodo, thanks to Henry Ford and his Model T. Jack wants–or thinks he wants–a full-time position with his espionage organization, vaguely connected to the British Admiralty. But he goes back and forth, because his work to protect the empire challenges his political and moral beliefs in the rights of the poor and disenfranchised.

Already, this feels like new ground: a would-be spy who reflects on the bodies that fall in his wake. He tries to reconcile what he’s seen and done with the more abstract threat from German militarism and its leaders’ disrespect for the rights of others, and sometimes, he comes up empty. Even better, Jack’s work conflicts with his passion for the exquisite Caitlin Hanley, an American journalist he meets in China; among other tasks, he’s assigned to investigate links between German agents and Irish separatists whom Caitlin’s family supports. Her combination of progressive politics, will to change the world, and career ambition have smitten him, but for once, this is a spy novel in which the hero worries that the woman of his dreams doesn’t love him. She likely won’t if she learns who he really is.

Then there’s the spy stuff, which Jack has to learn on the job. He’s a quick study, but his opponents sometimes outwit him, and he has several narrow escapes. His social gifts and ability to speak nine languages let him assume false identities with relative ease. But he also feels out of his depth, which makes him human, a refreshingly anti-James Bond. Like the prototypical spy, Jack trots the world, from China to San Francisco to New York and beyond, but Downing’s grasp of history keeps the travel suitably difficult and the connections unreliable.

A few critics have taken the author to task, saying that he should concentrate on Jack’s on-the-job training and damp down the history. Fie, say I, and not just because I’m a historian of that era and love that stuff. Jack and Caitlin read newspapers avidly because they care deeply about politics, also the hub of their respective professions. I never felt as if they were batting headlines back and forth to dump information on the reader or paint a backdrop.

As for historical accuracy, it’s impressive, especially considering the wealth of detail. The narrative does suggest that conscription existed in Britain then, which isn’t true (not until 1916), and Jack’s surveillance of a German agent in New York would have been hampered by having to crank his Model T to start the engine.

But these nits are worth mentioning only because of discussions I’ve seen recently in the blogosphere that even one petty detail got wrong can ruin a book. Really? There isn’t a historian writing today who doesn’t accept the chances of error, so why should novelists be held to a higher standard? Imagination trumps pedantry, any day.

Sorry for my digression. Read Jack of Spies. You won’t be disappointed.

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

A City Burned

26 Monday Jan 2015

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Review: Shall We Not Revenge, by D. M. Pirrone
Allium, 2014. 323 pp. $17

For most Chicagoans, the winter of 1872 means untold hardship. The Great Fire has ravaged the city, destroying thousands of homes and workplaces, and the shantytowns that spring up to house the destitute and jobless offer no comforts or hope. People do what they must to stay warm in bitter cold, make it through another day, and keep their families together. Relief is paltry and slow, but criminals may be found everywhere. Gang bosses know where there’s money to be made, often thanks to corrupt police, who look the other way for a cut of the take.

Chicagoans of all classes flee from the Great Fire. From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 28 October 1871. (Courtesy Chicago Historical Society)

Chicagoans of all classes flee from the Great Fire. From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 28 October 1871. (Courtesy Chicago Historical Society)

It’s in this brutal, gritty atmosphere that someone has killed a rabbi in his synagogue, bashing in his head with one silver menorah and stealing another. Was the motive robbery? The rabbi was much loved in his struggling neighborhood for good works, so it’s unlikely that anyone held a grudge. Yet he was also engaged in secret activities that no one wishes to talk about.

Newly appointed detective Frank Hanley must solve the case, and he faces long odds. Even beyond the native distrust city residents have for Chicago’s finest or the immigrant population’s belief that police are oppressors, to the Jews mourning their beloved leader, Hanley’s an outsider, an Irish Catholic who couldn’t possibly understand their ways or respect them.

From this premise, Pirrone (a pseudonym) crafts an engrossing story that keeps twisting this way and that until the very end. It includes a growing attraction between Hanley and Rivka Kelmansky, the late rabbi’s daughter, who helps him gather clues and navigate the cultural shoals that threaten to swamp the investigation at every turn. I like how the author frames Jewish rituals and customs from Hanley’s perspective, and how his misperceptions of them sometimes lead him to the wrong conclusions. I also like how she describes the city, the poor, modern police procedure in its infant days, and the underworld that so often evades justice. The sense of time and place is so strong that it almost carries the narrative by itself.

 

He sighed and trudged down the sidewalk. The cold kept the planks from sinking into the frozen mud beneath and dampened the pervasive odors of moist lumber and rotting vegetables. The light was thin and gray, like the remnants of snow on the ground, and flurries swirled in the air. Not enough to cover the dirty snow-crust and muck, unfortunately. . . . He loathed winter . . . [e]specially now, with the city’s scorched bones still bared to the sky and the taste of smoke in the air.

What I disliked was how the author writes her characters. With few exceptions, they’re either all good or rotten to the core. Hanley in particular feels too good to be true, not least his rapid recovery from severe injuries. He’s always on the right side, without prejudices, a good boy who even washes the dinner dishes and treats all women with respect. His only flaw is a bad temper, but what o’ that? Likewise, his immediate boss has unshakable trust in Frank–a neophyte–which leads to interventions that feel contrived, at times. More nuanced portrayals would have given Pirrone even more tension than she achieves.

Her prose, vivid though it is in description, falters at emotional moments. Too often, the narrative tells what the characters feel, sometimes even to repeat what they’ve already shown.

That said, I enjoyed Shall We Not Revenge for the story and the setting, a historical background that I’d never read about.

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

Playing the Hand You’re Dealt

22 Thursday Jan 2015

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Review: The Hollow Ground, by Natalie S. Harnett
St. Martin’s, 2014. 320 pp. $25

Child abuse is my least favorite subject to read about in fiction. Having reviewed two books this week in which parents systematically reduce a child to emotional rubble, I feel shaken and a bit ambushed, especially because I wasn’t expecting it. The publishers’ synopses said nothing about it, so I guess I’m not the only one who minds.

However, the flap copy for The Hollow Ground does compare the novel’s child narrator, Brigid Howley, to Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and I have to say, Harnett earns the comparison. The story unfolds in the Pennsylvania coal fields in the early 1960s, vividly and excruciatingly rendered through Brigid’s eyes. She’s the most rounded, complete child narrator I’ve read in years: perceptive, but not unnaturally so; awkward as she should be; struggling to understand the nightmare in which she lives; and, poor soul, trying her damndest to appease the monsters who stage it. Good luck. To top it off, something happened in the mines to her late uncle and her disabled father, which, according to legend, is why her family lives under a curse.

Pennsylvania coal miners. (Courtesy State of Pennsylvania)

Pennsylvania coal miners. (Courtesy State of Pennsylvania)

Meanwhile, the ground is shifting beneath their feet, literally. Subterranean fires have closed the mines, throwing thousands out of work. Many houses have collapsed, whereas others have become uninhabitable, whether from carbon monoxide fumes or the tremendous heat. Wallpaper peels, cold water comes from the tap lukewarm, and vegetables ripen in the dead of winter. It’s as if hell has opened its jaws, ready to swallow them, hence the title.

But the real hell here is the Howleys. With perfect pitch, Harnett portrays their shifting alliances, which exclude Brigid and sacrifice her for her elders’ purposes. If she speaks up, they slap her down, sometimes physically. If she so much as flinches in humiliation, they pour it on. Her pain or discouragement or disappointment are nothing compared with theirs; how can she be so selfish as to suffer visibly? That’s how life is, they say, and she’d better get used to it. And oh, yes, they blame her for not being able to keep the place clean, taking no account of the inevitable coal dust that covers everything.

So unrelenting is this agonizing story that I had to force myself to read on. But I did anyway, because I rarely come across characters drawn with such depth and in such prose:

 

It was early July and warm but cooler than the hot spring had been. Fireflies lit up the dark hollows of the woods and no matter how bad things were, I couldn’t help but look on their glow as something magical. Sometimes late on clear nights . . . I’d take a blanket into the backyard and lie down to star watch. Whenever a falling star shot a powdery white streak through the sky, I made a wish. Sometimes I wished something horrible would happen to Ma for all the hurt she’d brought us through, but mostly I wished we’d just all be together again and as happy as I’d always thought we’d one day be.

All this is quite masterful, yet there’s one terrible, jarring note that nearly undoes the novel for me. Harnett has one character state the theme, that you have to play the hand you’re dealt, no matter how bad it is. No argument there, but the author also seems to say that forgetting the past is the first step. I can’t imagine how such an astute observer of human behavior could even suggest this, or imply that it’s an act of will, especially in the world she’s rendered.

The Howleys never say anything genuine about their conflicts with one another, only mouth off to use it as a weapon. Maybe in that sense, they might as well shut up; but even if they did, they wouldn’t forget. And in that benighted Howley clan, only Brigid cares to listen, so there’s no true emotional exchange, no way they’ll ever break the cycle. Which leaves me wondering how in blazes that poor girl will ever learn to play the cards she’s been dealt–and yet, you sense she will.

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

Dare Not Speak

19 Monday Jan 2015

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Review: The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals, by Wendy Jones
Europa, 2014. 235 pp. $17

A young man, taught all his life to weigh his words, blurts out a fateful question at a picnic. Wilfred doesn’t mean to ask Grace to marry him–they hardly know each other–but he can’t say what he’s really thinking, which is wondering how she gets into and out of her yellow dress. But before Wilfred can retract his proposal, Grace runs off to tell her parents the happy news.

From this whimsical premise comes a funny, poignant, and painful novel, one that deepens as the characters grow. Wilfred thinks he should be able to reverse his gaffe–in fact, there’s another woman he prefers–and, under other circumstances, maybe he could. After all, it’s 1924, a modern age when such a misunderstanding shouldn’t condemn two young people clearly unsuited to one another. But it’s also a small village in Wales, where everyone has an opinion about everyone else’s business–and Wilfred’s business is burying people, a delicate occupation in which his moral reputation matters.

Countryside, Mid Wales. (Courtesy

Countryside, Mid Wales. (Brecon Beacons National Park; courtesy visitwales.com)

More to the point, Wilfred’s tenuous ability to speak up for himself vanishes under the first blush of confrontation, while poor Grace has even less aplomb. Neither stand a chance against her bullying parents, who force them to the registry office. Wilfred has nobody to intercede for him, because his mother died giving birth to him, whereas his father, a kindly, live-and-let-live type, lacks the fire to push back.

But Wilfred’s not the only one imprisoned. His fiancée, who has been less than forthright, is also trapped, a complication that both evens the score and sets up a serious reckoning. The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price becomes a moral tale about the costs of dishonesty and failure to take responsibility.

Jones renders all this in simple, lovely prose, and her metaphors spring naturally out of everyday tasks, so that you say, Of course. Consider Wilfred’s musing about being “unhappily married for eternity” while–when else?–he’s sanding the wood on a coffin:

Being unhappily married might feel a lot like the dread of doing hours of prep–mathematics prep–algebra and logarithms, inescapable problems with no obvious answer, no solution he could ever find, every day for the rest of his life.

With such artistry at Jones’s command, I’m surprised that Grace’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. Reece, come across like Hollywood types, overdrawn to the point of caricature. They’re emotionally abusive, so they’re a hundred percent unpleasant, each and every moment. They have only one concern, their standing in the community, but with one brief exception, Jones never shows them in it. The doctor, for instance, would have been far more believable had everybody thought what a wonderful man he was, a true servant of medicine, unaware that he makes his wife and daughter miserable.

I wonder whether the author thought she had to make the parents absolutely heartless to bring about a certain (and, I think, dubious) decision at the end. But I’m pretty sure Jones could have had gotten the result she wanted in another, subtler way.

Still, I recommend The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, an impressive debut from a talented novelist.

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

A Racket, But Maybe the Best Game in Town

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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Review
Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For?
Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2014. 495 pp. $30

You may not want to read this book, but you should at least know what it says. And what Ian Morris says is “a paradoxical, counterintuitive, and frankly disturbing notion”: that throughout human history, war has made the world both safer and richer. He distinguishes two types of war, productive and nonproductive, so the argument is somewhat finer than it first appears. But you get the rough idea.

As someone who entered his teenage years when this country abandoned the promise of the Great Society to fight a pointless war in Southeast Asia, and when civil rights marchers were being beaten, jailed, and murdered simply for demanding their constitutional right to vote, on the face of it, I have a hard time swallowing Morris’s theory.

Even so, he persuaded me more than I thought he would. (I also have to say that I  enjoyed his witty, pungent prose.) I can believe that the Roman Empire, by subduing warring tribes, ended raiding and pillaging so that the odds of dying a violent death fell substantially over time. The same advance, Morris argues, occurred in ancient China and India, whereas in medieval Europe, it didn’t. Why? Because the rulers of Rome, China, and India–or, more precisely, their administrators–understood what the later European warlords didn’t, that plunder failed to pay in the long run.

Statue of a Roman soldier. (Courtesy Vera Kratochvil.)

Statue of a Roman soldier. (Courtesy Vera Kratochvil.)

What paid was enforcing civil order and charging for the service, which Morris calls “a racket, but it may still be the best game in town.” The racket worked if trade thrived, peasants fed the population and paid taxes, preferably collected by honest agents, because corruption hurt the state. However, civil order depended on force, as did repelling threats from without, so much of that efficiency and created wealth went toward military power. The difference between long-lasting empires and transient warlords was the willingness to restrain greed and incompetence and fight (mostly) those wars that strengthened the state, the productive ones. Take this to its logical conclusion, and you can see why empires end when maintaining their military advantage either becomes too expensive or physically impossible, and they risk fighting the wrong wars. As he points out, the United States faces this dilemma right now.

Where Morris falls short, I think, is when he starts sounding like a think tank, assuming that because the big picture makes sense (sort of), the little pictures must too. For instance, only once does he mention, in passing, civilian control of the military, the only means available to prevent those nasty, unproductive wars. That essential democratic concept must figure in the debate over how, or whether, democracies conduct wars against insurgents. Nor am I warmed all over by the idea that had Hitler won World War II, his empire would have been too large and piratical to sustain. I don’t care how many computer models have proven this; it’s no comfort.

I also mistrust averages, especially on a global scale. You may have heard of this paradox: Eight women throw a baby shower for a friend, but does that mean that all nine women average one month’s pregnancy? Of course not. So when I read that, over centuries, war has enriched the world by such-and-such percent, I want to know who got the money.

To his credit, Morris faces many ugly implications of his theory straight on. He repeatedly acknowledges that no victim of war would ever be cheered to think that the world had just been made safer or richer. But the most disturbing aspect, which he examines with such tact and grace that I have to applaud, is how violence seems ingrained in the human species and its primate relatives. His description of primate life is fascinating and eye-opening, and he damningly challenges Margaret Mead’s findings of peace and love on Samoa. (Apparently, her field research was much shorter and less thorough than she allowed.) I also liked his depiction of how the Soviet Union, built on bloody revolution and murder, peaceably dismantled itself about seventy years later.

War! What Is It Good For? is a provocative, important book, and I’m glad I read it.

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

Burdened by History

12 Monday Jan 2015

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Review: Night in Shanghai, by Nicole Mones
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. 277 pp. $30

What’s that, an American jazz musician who can’t improvise? A Western-educated Shanghai beauty sold by her father to a crime lord? Put them together, and you have a romance as atmospheric as they get. Throw in the Japanese invasion of China, and you have Night in Shanghai, a late 1930s tale of back-stabbing politics and love against tall odds.

A girl scout, Yang Huimin, smuggled a Nationalist flag into a Shanghai warehouse besieged by Japanese forces in 1937. (Courtesy Wikipedia.)

A girl scout, Yang Huimin, smuggled a Nationalist flag into a Shanghai warehouse besieged by Japanese forces in 1937. (Courtesy Wikipedia.)

Thomas Greene is a classically trained pianist, an African-American from Baltimore recruited by the agent of a Chinese mafioso to lead an all-black jazz orchestra. Jazz is a very big deal in Shanghai, and Thomas is startled and pleased to earn a good salary and live where his race doesn’t matter, or, as he puts it, “no one looked at him twice, for the first time in his life.” However, the music comes hard (he must have a written score, or he’s lost), and his struggles are so obvious that the more experienced jazzmen he’s supposed to lead look down on him. I liked this touch, which I thought made his character more sympathetic as well as unusual.

As Thomas gets the hang of his job, his eye falls on Song Yuhua, translator for the crime boss, who’d kill both of them if he (or his many henchmen) saw them together. But Song has her own secret: She’s a Communist, in a city where Nationalist thugs working for Chiang Kai-shek regularly murder Party members. She believes fervently in the cause, and she expects her superiors to share her ideals, because, after all, they’re on the same side. But history is working against her, just as it’s working against Thomas.

I liked the prose in Night in Shanghai the best, redolent as it is of the local food, manners, and metaphors. “To bring it up now would only create fear, just as speaking of a tiger makes one pale.” Or, of a person privileged by birth, “the waterfront pavilion gets moonlight first.” The physical descriptions are vivid too, as with this passage about Suzhou, adjacent to the city outskirts:

 

Beyond the gate, cobbled streets unwound beneath overhanging willows, soft in summer with green-dappled light. Canals were crossed by stone bridges whose half-moon arches made circles in the water. From the ponds and fields and wooded hills came peddlers with live flapping fish, caged ducks, bundles of freshwater greens, and tender shoots of baby green bamboo.

Unfortunately, the other aspects of the book didn’t always measure up, especially when compared with A Cup of Light, Mones’s gentle mystery novel about a porcelain expert. In that story, the tension never lapsed, even with nothing earthshaking at stake. But Night in Shanghai, for all its sound and fury, lets the protagonists off too easily, at times, diluting its power and promise. Writing so close to history is partly to blame–many secondary characters actually existed–so fact restricts what may or may not happen. I admire Mones’s commitment to the record, yet, after such a fine setup, history works against the narrative instead of for it.

Even so, I can recommend Night in Shanghai as a story about an unusual place at a crucial time. I learned more about China and the Japanese invasion, Shanghai as a city flooded by refugees (it required no entry visa), and, most particularly, that many African-American jazz musicians flocked there. The novel opened up this world to me, which I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

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

Telling a Life

08 Thursday Jan 2015

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Review: The Boston Girl, by Anita Diamant
Scribner, 2014. 322 pp. $26.

Like anyone else, I get a kick out of a novel in which I see pieces of my past laid out like a buffet. Addie Baum, the girl of the title, grows up in the first decades of the twentieth century, struggling to make a life she can call her own. She fights to stay in school, have a satisfying career, befriend other young women who dream of being more than baby makers, and choose her own husband, all of which sets her against her shtetl parents.

It’s those parents who seem most familiar, especially Addie’s horrid mother, who reminds me of my paternal grandmother (the one who said, at my bar mitzvah, “Very nice, Larry. You made only one mistake.”) Addie’s world opens when she visits a settlement house, a community meeting place common in large cities at the time; my mother used to speak fondly of one she belonged to in Greenwich Village.

Washington Street and Old South Meeting House, Boston, 1906. (Courtesy Library of Congress.)

Washington Street and Old South Meeting House, Boston, 1906. (Courtesy Library of Congress.)

Most important, Diamant’s Jewish characters feel Jewish without effort. If you think that sounds silly, or that I’m paying her an empty compliment–particularly given her many books on Jewish themes–I’m serious. It’s a pet peeve of mine when authors paste ritual observance onto characters who have no Jewish inner life, outlook, belief, or disbelief, and pass that off as authentic. A recent example was The Mapmaker’s Daughter, by Laurel Corona, a novelist I otherwise admire.

So what’s not to like about The Boston Girl? Well, a few things.

For one, as I said, it’s a buffet, carefully selected goodies in vignettes, some quite brief. The setup is an elderly Addie telling her life to her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter, and though that kind of narration can be deadly and clumsy (think Wuthering Heights), for the most part, Diamant avoids that danger. However, she’s got a lot of ground to cover, and at times, the narrative skims the surface. Some chapters seem to exist to express homilies, like how kindness means more than intellectual accomplishment, or “a girl should always have her own money.” I couldn’t agree more, but it seems that Diamant strives for a feel-good story at the expense of depth.

The Boston Girl is nominally historical fiction, yet history feels very much in the background, something to slide by rather than live in. The only event that feels immediate or important is the influenza epidemic of 1919, whereas World War I or the Sacco and Vanzetti case or the Great Depression merely rate honorable mentions.

My favorite parts recount Addie’s travails working for a newspaper for a lecherous, lazy, alcoholic boss. In 1920s newsrooms, the few female reporters grudgingly hired for the home and society pages were targets for condescension, sexual harassment, or both. Diamant strikes a pitch-perfect note between her heroine’s eagerness, desperation to be somebody, and knowledge that her fellow man shouldn’t always be trusted.

I also liked Addie’s friends from the settlement house, particularly Filomena, a young Italian woman who wants, against all odds, to be an artist, and has the gift for it. The feminist message comes through loud and clear in these portrayals, as in Addie’s life. Diamant does her women a great service by letting them talk about many subjects other than men, though of course, there’s also romance.

Is The Boston Girl really a novel, or a short-story collection of uneven quality? I’m not sure. As a buffet, it’s not a feast, but a nosh.

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

Creative Destruction

05 Monday Jan 2015

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Review
Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
Penguin, 2002. 304 pp. $16

Where, you may ask, can you find wonder in a novel about a bubonic plague epidemic that causes apocalyptic losses and prompts superstitious people to destroy each other?

Yet wonder there is, and a tiny Derbyshire village in 1666 becomes the water droplet in which a microscope reveals the world. Anna Frith, a young widow who supplements her meager living by serving the rector as housemaid, throws herself into the tasks imposed by a lethal disease that nobody understands. Apprenticing herself to the charismatic, tireless, and moody Rector Mompellion and his thoughtful wife, Elinor, Anna comforts the dying, mourns the dead, and tries to protect the survivors from each other–when she can.

Paul Fürst, engraving, c. 1721, of a plague doctor of Marseilles. His nose-case is filled with smoking material to keep off the plague.

A plague doctor, Marseilles, from an engraving by Paul Fürst, about 1721. The beak contains material thought to ward off the disease. (Courtesy Wikipedia.)

Through these thankless, seemingly pitiful efforts, Anna creates a wonder: herself. In this hottest of crucibles, she tests her abilities, courage, fears, religious beliefs, and ideas about love, tempering her character and soul. Year of Wonders is a coming-of-age story, among other things, and seldom have I read such an intelligent, unsparing, limpidly written, and satisfying one as this.

A novel with this background reminds me of Albert Camus’s philosophical masterpiece, The Plague, in which Dr. Rieux, the hero, does all he can to combat the disease, though he knows his work has no effect. Camus’s plague is an allegory for Nazism, to which the only antidote is belief in humanity, feeble though that seems. (By the way, he wrote his first draft where Village of Secrets by Caroline Moorehead takes place. See my review, “The Just and Unjust,” December 15.)

Year of Wonders is, of course, a very different book, but Anna is herself a thinker, in her feet-in-the-soil way, and that, too, underlies the title. She repeatedly asks herself whether God sent the plague, and why, a prime question of the late seventeenth century, when Europeans were beginning to embrace scientific observation, not divine writ, as the key to deciphering the natural world. Her answers to this question change over time, and, fitting her character, occur in such ordinary moments as when she stubs her toe or takes a horse out for exercise. Though Brooks never makes this explicit–properly so–Anna, the rector, and Elinor represent the cusp of a frightening yet liberating discovery, the role of random chance. How they react to their gradual, hard-won insights makes this a rich, engrossing story.

Year of Wonders is the third Geraldine Brooks novel I’ve read, and, like the other two (Caleb’s Crossing; March), she shows a sure hand with the language, ways, and social beliefs of the time. However, I prefer this novel (her first), because it feels fuller, somehow, more compact and direct, elegant in its simple framework while exploiting its angles and surfaces. I had a little trouble with the narrative, at first, trying to figure out the sequence of events, but that soon resolved. The ending, though very satisfying, may not be entirely plausible, but I like its irony, and it reinforces what Brooks is trying to say.

I heartily recommend this book, which has given me a great deal to think about, as a reader and novelist.

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