Monthly Archives: June 2015

Homage to Tom Jones: The Foundling Boy

29 Monday Jun 2015

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With this post, I’m starting a summer schedule, in which I’ll review one book a week.

Review: The Foundling Boy, by Michel Déon
Translated from the French by Julian Evans
Gallic, 2013 [Gallimard, 1975] 415 pp. $16

Halfway through this poignant, often hilarious tale, the protagonist, Jean Arnaud, comes across a truth I wish I’d taken to heart at age seventeen, as he does:

There was, then, no shame in being young, not the way adults wanted to make you believe, saying every time you advanced the slightest opinion, ‘Wait till you’ve grown up a little. . . . When you’ve done what we did, then you can speak.’ . . . [I]t was no crime to make mistakes, to give in to your enthusiasms, to be happy or unhappy because a girl made you suffer.

Jean imbibes this lesson after reading Stendhal, who’d have enjoyed the young man’s amorous adventures and the gentle irony with which Déon tells of his growing up. But this picaresque novel also harks back to Henry Fielding’s rollicking eighteenth-century masterpiece, Tom Jones. Both begin with a foundling child of mysterious origins who fits no societal niche and will have to make his fortune through his gifts of character, which turn out to be considerable.

However, The Foundling Boy takes place in France between the world wars, not eighteenth-century England, and the particular atmosphere in which people try to recover from old wounds offers a perfect forum in which to observe how people enjoy life (or don’t). In this, the novel has a distinctly French sensibility, by which I mean that the characters who succeed are those who know better than to take themselves too seriously. I think this notion is what the French, at their best, have given Western civilization.

Once the basket bearing a newborn infant is left on a doorstep belonging to a childless couple, caretakers of a Norman estate, there’s little plot to speak of. But don’t worry. Episode quickly follows episode, and Jean gets into scrape after scrape, portrayed with wit, charm, and keen observation. Most of the story takes place in Normandy and Provence, so if you like France, or can imagine or have experienced the pleasures of either place–cider and ancient greenery in one; warm colors and aromatic herbs in the other–you’ll like this book.

Postcard of Marseilles, 1920s (Courtesy Travel and Tourism Provence).

Postcard of Marseilles, 1920s (Courtesy Travel and Tourism Provence).

Sometimes, the omniscient narrator takes time out to tell you who’s important to remember, and who isn’t, as if Déon were your mentor. The role fits, for practically everybody wants to mold Jean to his or her own purposes–for his own good, of course. His adoptive father wants him to be a gardener, like himself, and to stay close to home; a con man tries to teach him to be a con man, and roam the world; and Ernst, a German youth he meets on a bicycle trip to Italy, insists that fascism offers the only useful, honest path in life.

All this is ripe for satire, and Déon doesn’t miss a trick. Especially as a young boy, Jean has no experience with which to filter out the useful advice from noise or what, to the reader, appears the counselor’s self-interest. Jean’s not weak–far from it–just green, but that constantly gets him into trouble. And as he navigates through his difficulties, what’s personal to Jean is also political and social commentary about 1930s Europe, though he doesn’t always know that. For instance, he can’t figure out why Ernst, who seems to laugh a lot and be good-natured, should take himself and his country so seriously, especially to spout hateful, vaguely frightening ideas from a book called Mein Kampf. Jean’s puzzlement reflects a common attitude of the time, one explanation for why so many Europeans underestimated Hitler.

Originally published in 1975, The Foundling Boy is a classic in France, though only recently translated into English, as with its sequel, The Foundling’s War. Déon belongs to the Academie Française, but he’s now also part of my personal pantheon: a great writer I’d never heard of.

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

A Century Old, Yet Still New: The Fall of the Ottomans

25 Thursday Jun 2015

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Review: The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, by Eugene Rogan
Basic, 2015. 485 pp. $32
Not everyone will be interested in how and why the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War, and what resulted, but maybe they should be. Pick any current headline about that region, and you’ll find its roots in Rogan’s narrative, whether it’s Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide, machinations over Iraqi oil, or the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Of the four imperial thrones that the war toppled, Westerners probably know least about the Ottomans. (The other three were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.) Turkey, having fought two revolutions and three wars between 1908 and 1914, needed peace desperately. By playing the Russians off against the Germans, Turkish diplomats adeptly sought promises that would allow their country to remain neutral. But hawks who feared that their empire would break apart unless Turkey backed the winning side, successfully pushed to join the Central Powers.

You have to wonder how history might have played out had Turkey stayed neutral. What, for instance, would have happened to Palestine and the oil-producing regions? I wish Rogan had devoted space to this, but he doesn’t go in for speculation. Rather, using an astonishingly impressive array of Turkish, Arab, and European sources, he traces military campaigns and the politics that influenced or resulted from them, quoting the participants. Rogan argues that the diplomatic promises the Allies made to each other, Arab nationalists, or Zionists, derived from panic (usually overblown fears of jihadists) or fuzzy, short-term thinking. If pressed, Allied diplomats would have insisted they had promised less than the potential beneficiaries believed. Little did they know how their words would be parsed for decades to come.

From the military side, Gallipoli gets much of Rogan’s attention, deservedly so. From the Turkish perspective, the Allied invasion signified the Crusades revisited, an attitude prevalent in the Middle East today concerning Western military power. The Turkish victory, which cost the Ottomans even more lives than the Allies, resulted from tenacity and brilliant generalship. The Allied disaster came about from ad hoc strategy executed by inept tacticians; if you believe, as I do, that the British and imperial soldiery were lions led by donkeys, Gallipoli could be Exhibit A. Rogan captures the misery, the heroism, and the fear, as with this memoir of the last moments before “going over the top”:

The moments appeared like hours–the suspense–then the officer, his eyes glued on his watch following that finger (of death) slowly, so slowly, but surely moving to destruction–maybe a second left to live–for this is sacrifice–this is the moment when all hearts are sad and heavy–when you will hear some muttering a prayer. . . .

But the greatest service Rogan renders in The Fall of the Ottomans is, I think, his thorough, vivid, and decisive handling of the Armenian genocide. To show how the tension between Turk and Armenian increased, he explains Turkish fears of Armenian collaboration with the Russian enemy, for which there was some evidence. As for what followed, Rogan names names, places, dates, and, when possible, numbers. His chilling descriptions recall aspects of the Holocaust, as with eager civilians who participated, or long, forced marches, during which thousands of Armenians, dying of thirst or starvation, were clubbed or bayoneted to death. I didn’t know that Greek Christians were deported and dispossessed (though not killed), or that Assyrian Christians met the same fate as the Armenians. These facts, rarely mentioned, are surely significant.

Turkish soldiers march Armenians to prison in Mezireh, April 1915, photographed by an unknown German bystander (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Turkish soldiers march Armenians to prison in Mezireh, April 1915, photographed by unknown German bystander (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

After the war ended, the Turkish government prosecuted eighteen defendants accused of ordering or carrying out the massacres, hanging a few and convicting the others in absentia. (Armenian agents tracked down the missing defendants and assassinated all but one.) Apparently, the Turks were trying to placate the victors, hoping to gain favorable peace terms. When that didn’t work, the country went to war again, led by Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, and fixed the borders more to Turkish liking. Whether that resentment led to Turkish intransigence about admitting the genocide, Rogan doesn’t speculate.

I’d have liked The Fall of the Ottomans much better had the author written more carefully. The narrative, full of repetitions and clumsy phrases, plods sometimes. But if you read this book, I guarantee that you won’t look at Middle Eastern politics in quite the same way again.

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

Novel As Synopsis: The Flight of the Sparrow

22 Monday Jun 2015

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Review: Flight of the Sparrow: A Novel of Early America, by Amy Belding Brown
NAL, 2014. 331 pp. $15

Flight of the Sparrow depicts the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the mid-1670s and the bloody struggle between colonists and Native Americans known as King Philip’s War. The premise supposes that Indians raiding a Massachusetts settlement kill the men and a few women and children, while taking the rest captive, among them Mary Rawlandson, a minister’s wife. For Mary, as for the other captives, shock follows shock–the murders, separation from loved ones, enslavement, near-starvation after a life of relative plenty, the constant threat of death.

The Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the U.S.)

But Mary’s captivity involves much more than trauma, which is why Flight of the Sparrow is a fascinating book. Her church teaching has reinforced the common assumption among the English colonists that the devil drives Native American life, and that heathen depravity makes Indians less than human. No surprise there, but what Brown does with that gives rich thematic scope to her narrative. Mary learns that many aspects of native life compare favorably with her own, including kind playfulness toward children, the willingness to share, greater respect for women, and, perhaps most of all, the expression of deep, unconstrained feeling.

Though Mary dreams of returning to colonial society and her husband, Joseph–whose absence the day of the raid saved his life–she begins to rethink who she is and what she wants, questions she’s never asked herself. She’s a captive, yet her definition of freedom (and relationship with God) will never be the same. You sense that she’ll somehow resume her former life, and you want to know how she’ll deal with that, or how the other colonists will view her.

To her credit, Brown airbrushes nothing, seeking neither to excuse nor obscure the gruesome violence Mary witnesses, nor to patronize the Native Americans as noble savages. It’s a generally sympathetic portrait, but a mixed one, and I believe it, as I do her portrayal of colonial ways. I knew very little of this subject, so I was pleased to read her thoughtful, thought-provoking narrative. For theme and scope, Flight of the Sparrow deserves an audience.

But in other ways, this is an artless, frustrating novel. Mary’s the only character of any depth. Her husband’s fire-and-brimstone persona wears thin after a while, because you can’t tell what sin and salvation actually mean to him, or why he has his particular take. To say that he’s a Calvinist preacher or a man of his time and place gives Brown leeway at first, but sooner or later, she has to show us more to keep him a plausible character with more than one dimension. There are hints, here and there, of vanities, desires, and weaknesses, but I wish she’d explored them. It would have made him more sympathetic, and a true match for Mary. Likewise, the baptized Indian man, James, who protects Mary as best he can, seems more like a representative than a full person. He’s crucial to the themes, plot, and politics of the narrative, and he reflects her conscience, but I wanted more.

The writing also bothers me, especially the emotional transitions. Instead of using metaphor, memory, or sensory clues to show what Mary feels, Brown offers summaries, full of rhetorical questions and bald statements. “She begins to accept the fact that he [Joseph] will not come for her and her affection for him shrivels.” This is a key moment, surely worth exploration. Another is the night Mary approaches James’s tent, an action that should feel as if all the devils in hell are leering at her, even as her desperation to understand what only James can tell her drives her toward him. But Brown describes the action, so that the passage reminds me of an emotional synopsis, what she might have written in planning the chapter. In certain similar moments, you can even imagine the bullet points, as with, “She becomes abruptly aware of how her clothes restrict her and promote her submission.”

I don’t mean to pick on Brown or hold her up to ridicule. I think she’s an astute writer who’s told a story of psychological complexity; I only wish she’d carried it through. And I bring this up because I’m trying to figure out whether my insistence means I’m chasing rare air in the literary atmosphere. Reading The Flight of the Sparrow makes me wonder about other books in which the authors tell too much, and whether most readers prefer that.

What do you think?

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

Rumors of His Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: Sundance

18 Thursday Jun 2015

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Review: Sundance: A Novel, by David Fuller
Riverhead, 2014. 338 pp. $28

In this suspenseful, thoroughly enjoyable tale, Harry Longbaugh, aka the Sundance Kid, didn’t really die in Bolivia in 1908. How could he have? He was serving twelve years in a Wyoming prison for armed robbery, dreaming of a reunion with his beloved wife, Etta, from whom he hasn’t heard in two years. So when he’s finally released in 1913, he sets out to find her, unsure whether she even loves him still.

The Sundance Kid and his wife, Etta Place, in 1901 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The Sundance Kid and his wife, Etta Place, in 1901 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Trouble is, he’s a free man barely an hour when a seventeen-year-old kid provokes him into a duel. Naturally, Longbaugh’s quicker on the draw. Naturally, the boy’s death brings the local law after Harry. And just as naturally, when Harry traces Etta to New York City, a detective much smarter than the local Wyoming law follows him.

Shortly after Harry reaches New York, he gathers that Etta’s also on the run, but not from the law. Actually, it’s worse: Her political activities have made powerful enemies, including the Black Hand, a mafioso ring operating in Little Italy. Harry doesn’t know what to make of his wife’s social conscience and the new life she’s led during the past two years.

But that’s not all that’s changed:

 

He had heard of motorcars while inside, but seeing one in person made him keenly aware of the things he had missed. He was entering the world anew. He thought he heard the jingle of harness and clop of horseshoes as the motorcar passed, clearly his imagination, then was surprised when a horse and wagon came around behind him. Surprised, but also relieved. The old world was not quite banished, but it had certainly eroded.

 

Harry has seen electric lights before, but not the profusion that illumines New York. Trolleys, elevated trains, subway tunnels, and skyscrapers earn his admiration; I loved the scene in which he travels to the top of a skyscraper under construction. There are billboards and stores devoted entirely to men’s clothes, if you can believe that–the notion takes him aback–but certain things never change. Ever the honorable outlaw, he foils a pickpocket ring in the act and returns the bag of missing wallets and jewelry to their astonished, grateful owners. (Right afterward, Harry reappears at the scene, dressed in his new city duds, but nobody recognizes him, because he’s no longer a cowboy–a clever touch.)

I like that scene, which is more than just a bravura performance by our hero. Fuller means to show how Harry represents the decline of the Old West (and our romantic notions of it), while being self-consciously aware that he and his kind have ridden off into the sunset. But that’s where Sundance confuses me, because everything about it is romantic, so much so that the subtitle, A Novel, is misleading. It’s more like a typical Hollywood movie in which the characters are all one way or all another, so the conflict isn’t between complex people. Rather, it’s an opposition of single traits or ideas–evil versus good, justice versus exploitation, treachery versus integrity. And yet, Fuller has much to say about the Progressive Era that feels like politicking–labor conditions, women’s rights, disarmament, radical movements–which seems out of place in this context.

Harry’s an extraordinary guy. He can charm just about anyone, slip into and out of a building like a ghost, give expert marital advice, and is a remarkably quick study for things he doesn’t have a clue about. He’s even a dab hand at modern art. You’d never know he’d spent twelve years in prison–his psyche seems remarkably sound, without a drop of bitterness–and he’s a thoroughly honorable man. He’s a character to root for, and you keep reading just to see what amazing feat he’ll perform next. But he’s not a real person.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed reading Sundance (and couldn’t get the movie theme song out of my head). Fuller tells a tense story. He writes well, beautifully at times. He does shoehorn historical references into the narrative, especially toward the (not quite believable) end. I also wish he didn’t alternate stretches of dialogue in which you can’t tell who’s speaking with others in which he explains the characters’ motives, as if they weren’t already clear. But despite its charms, Sundance would have been much better had Fuller decided either to tell a tall tale or a realistic novel, and go at that whole hog.

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

What You Will: The Tutor

15 Monday Jun 2015

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Review: The Tutor, by Andrea Chapin
Riverhead, 2015. 356 pp. $28

A twenty-six-year-old actor named Will Shakespeare entertains a crowd of minor nobility at a Lancashire estate in 1590. Master Shakespeare has as yet written nothing to deserve the fame or fortune he confidently expects, and his most evident talents are dressing above his station and seducing scullery maids. The occasion is St. Crispin’s Day, which means that Shakespeare-loving readers know what to expect.

William Shakespeare, 1610 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

William Shakespeare, 1610 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Sure enough, instead of verse honoring the saint, the bold, foppish visitor launches into speeches about a martial king who spouts phrases like “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” The performance enthralls everyone, even the French guests, though they realize that Shakespeare is recalling Henry V’s crushing victory over their forebears at Agincourt.

I call this an “Oh, Susannah!” moment because, when I was little, I saw a Hollywood movie about Stephen Foster, in which the composer no sooner sings his masterpiece than the world taps its collective foot. To be fair, Chapin handles the scene with bravura, and I must confess, I’m the last person to criticize, for I owe my name to Henry V and grew up hearing those speeches around the house. Even so, it’s a tad hokey.

However, the real reason to read The Tutor is to appreciate how Chapin depicts the young genius and his disturbing effect on others, especially women. The key woman here is Katharine de L’Isle, a beautiful, extremely literate widow of thirty-one, a poor relation to the noble family that has taken her in since she was orphaned at a young age. Will tutors the children of the manor, but he casts his eyes elsewhere, quickly finding Katharine, or Kate, as he insists on calling her. From the first, sparks fly in repartee worthy of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. To keep him at arm’s length, she corrects the verses he shows her, questioning his word choices and lambasting his style with a sure hand, which piques his vanity but drives him to improve. But she’s already lost, and she knows it. Worse, the poem he’s wrestling with is Venus and Adonis.

What a brilliant stroke: The two play out the mythical characters as if the long, drawn-out seduction were their own. Everything Kate’s heard and seen should tell her that Will’s using her, to cast her aside when he pleases. He’s lecherous, cruel, a social climber, an actor who spins lies like truth and demands loyalty while giving none. But Will’s more charismatic and exciting than anyone Kate has ever met, and she, who has spent her life loving words, hears them in a new way. For once–hallelujah!–I’ve read a convincing portrayal of a desperate, obsessive love.

Chapin knows her literary ground and understands the poetry, while her shrewd characterization of a jealous man who lives a double sexual standard perhaps prefigures such plays as Much Ado, Othello, or Measure for Measure. (When Will calls Kate a headstrong woman who deserves her solitary widowhood, it’s hard not to think of Taming of the Shrew; and when three accused witches pass through, their presence recalls Macbeth.)

But the novel would be better minus excess baggage. Kate’s household is Catholic, suffering persecution under Queen Elizabeth’s repressive hand, and though that suits the time, I think it unbalances The Tutor. The religious war brings about convenient exits and entrances, but several feel forced, as do a few of the many deaths. The way Chapin portrays this dysfunctional family slides into melodrama at moments.

Kate feels too good to be true, especially for her time–her extraordinary intellectual gifts, the way she risks her reputation without a qualm (or, for that matter, correction), her acceptance of a male cousin’s homosexuality, the way she treats her maid almost like a friend. I can accept one or two of these, but all? I’m not sure. The language, though almost always suitable and lovely indeed, still lapses into the modern, as when the male cousin talks like a therapist, or when random idioms or words like paranoia or spymaster appear.

All that aside, though, The Tutor offers many pleasures, and I expect that readers who love Shakespeare without worshiping him will enjoy it, as I did.

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

Breaking News: John Spurling Wins the Walter Scott Prize

13 Saturday Jun 2015

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John Spurling has just won the Walter Scott Prize for The Ten Thousand Things, an engrossing philosophical novel about a Chinese painter, a real historical figure of the Yuan Dynasty. I liked it very much, and you may read why here.

First place carries an award of £25,000. Spend it in good health, Mr. Spurling.

Confusion: The Aftermath

11 Thursday Jun 2015

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Review: The Aftermath, by Rhidian Brook
Knopf, 2013. 267 pp. $26

Brook starts with a terrific premise and mines its thematic possibilities with skill. It’s 1946, and Col. Lewis Morgan, a decorated career officer, has been posted to Hamburg to govern its British zone. His wife, Rachael, and their thirteen-year-old son join him there, occupying a splendid house, one of the few left standing in that shattered city. But hanging over their long-awaited reunion is the memory of the Morgans’ elder son, killed in a German bombing raid. Rachael has never recovered and seems not to want to; Lew pushes his grief aside, throwing himself into his all-consuming job, earning German trust while helping the defeated enemy rebuild.

 

Royal Air Force canteen, occupied Germany, 1946 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Royal Air Force canteen, occupied Germany, 1946 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Scorning the rules against fraternizing with civilians, Morgan invites the Lubert family living in the house, father and daughter, to remain. The place is large enough, and Lew’s convinced the Luberts weren’t Nazis, so why create another homeless family? But Rachael is furious. Share living space with the people who killed her boy?

Meanwhile, Lew tries to govern with a light hand, dispensing kindness and common sense. But much of the job involves identifying those civilians who belonged to the secret police or were otherwise tainted, an exceptionally difficult task, for which his subordinates think he’s much too trusting. Like Rachael, they assume everyone’s guilty, so that Lew faces unrest at headquarters as well as at home. Every scene asks who’s to blame: If it’s not the woman who kept company with a Nazi bigwig, the starving children who thieve to stay alive, or the factory workers spreading dissension, then who? And is every death equivalent, or does that of Rachael’s boy really matter less or more than anyone else’s?

I wish The Aftermath had stayed with these absorbing questions, to which reason and feeling sometimes offer conflicting answers. However, the novel betrays its characters, and the only reason I can see is to pursue an even larger theme, redemption, capital R. To explain, I’ll have to reveal (sorry) what most readers will probably guess from the jacket flap, if not the situation: Rachael winds up in Lubert’s arms. The encounters are so passionate and satisfying, the two former enemies enact their own forgiveness and dream of a new life together.

Hold on. Lew’s a maddeningly distant husband–no argument there–more so because he’s off acting like a saint at work. This feels true to life; somebody’s got to pay for all that goodness. But we never see why he’s emotionally absent, and Rachael never asks. Since he wasn’t always withdrawn, maybe his wartime service changed him. And since they’ve spent almost the entire war apart, except for their boy’s funeral, maybe she might try to draw him out, especially given his reticence. But Rachael doesn’t talk at all, while expecting him to help her, somehow. But of course he doesn’t, so after a few months of painful, uneasy silence, she betrays him, which feels rather quick, as if she’d already given up on him before she arrived in Hamburg. I find it hard to sympathize with her. Or either of them, actually.

Then again, few of these relationships make psychological sense to me. Rachael’s grief is such that she neglects her surviving son–okay–but the boy somehow never catches on that his mother prefers his dead brother. Seems to me he’d try harder to get her attention. Brook also undercuts his hero by setting a cardboard villain against him–Major Burnham, the intelligence officer who hates all Germans, is even nastier drunk than sober, and corrupt, besides. The author would have done much better to switch his character with Lew’s, while keeping their politics intact. That would have added depth to both while giving Rachael more grounds to take up with Lubert.

And what a guy Lubert is, repaying Lew’s kindness by cuckolding him and, with lip service to guilt, acting as if Lew deserves it. Like Rachael, he’s a clueless parent, thinking his fifteen-year-old daughter merely rebellious and angry when she’s plainly disturbed. It’s hard to pull for him, either, so the redemptive love is hardly that, and by this time, the reader’s looking for help.

Much happens in The Aftermath that’s worth thinking about. But the characters seem to exist only in the moment, and the end wraps up loose ends all too quickly.

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

Lies and More Lies: When the World Was Young

08 Monday Jun 2015

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Review: When the World Was Young, by Elizabeth Gaffney
Random House, 2015. 298 pp. $26

You’d think that V-J Day would bring young Wallace “Wally” Baker a boatload of joy. The war that’s lasted half her life is finally over; her father, a naval officer in the South Pacific, will come home; and maybe the government will end rationing, so that her mother’s chocolate pound cake won’t be such a luxury anymore.

75 Montague Street, Brooklyn Heights, a century-old building (Courtesy Joe Mabel, via Wikimedia Commons).

75 Montague Street, Brooklyn Heights, a century-old building (Courtesy Joe Mabel, via Wikimedia Commons).

But in this moving, beautifully written coming-of-age novel, that day of victory brings Wally heartache, which the adults around her do nothing to assuage, let alone recognize. The grand, ancestral brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, where she lives with her mother and maternal grandparents, offers material comfort, but that’s about all Wally can be thankful for. Stella, her mother, is distant, beautiful, selfish, and neglectful; Wally desperately needs the attention she can never have. To be fair, Stella has suffered tragic losses, including the deaths of a fiancé and a child, and she’s emotionally fragile.

Yet Stella doesn’t entirely realize that her surviving child has a claim on her. And though Wally never wants for good food or clothes or the Wonder Woman comic books she loves, no one in the family sees her as anything but a reflection of themselves. Only when she displeases them do they notice her, usually to punish her for asking questions about secrets they wish to hide, or for speaking her mind. She doesn’t even have a choice about what name she goes by. Wallace is her middle name, inherited from Stella, and Stella refuses to call her any other, as if her daughter were merely a diminutive of herself.

The only adult who cares for Wally is Loretta, the black maid of all work, whose son, Ham, is Wally’s inseparable companion. Wally picks up Ham’s passion for studying ants (an activity with which Gaffney reflects the action, in apt, extended metaphors). More than that, Wally finds in him the affection, praise, shared spirit of adventure, and listener she gets nowhere else. Loretta would be glad to help, but she has white employers to please. She’s not about to answer Wally’s dangerous questions, nor tell her that Ham’s friendship, though genuine, has been sponsored by Stella’s mother in the form of wages. So Loretta does what she can, which is to keep Wally well fed and safe.

The narrative jumps around confusingly in its efforts to stitch the events that precede V-J to that day and its aftermath. Nevertheless, you can see Wally’s slow, insistent progress toward glimpses of ugly truths–race prejudice, adult hypocrisy, betrayals, and class snobbery. Gaffney does a brilliant job filtering Wally’s observations through a painful, endearing, true-to-life naivety that often leads the girl to wild misinterpretations. For instance, she imagines that Mr. Niederman, a mathematician who boards with her family, must be a spy or somehow dangerous. She keeps trying to make what she learns about him fit into her exciting fantasy, missing the more prosaic threat that the reader understands long before she does.

I admire how Gaffney stretches her range with this novel, very different from the sprawling, gritty Metropolis (which I also liked). She shows with When the World Was Young that she can realize subtle scenes on a small stage, a talent I admire. However, like Metropolis, When the World Was Young has its melodramatic moments, which play worse on that smaller stage. Again like its predecessor, When the World Was Young sometimes adopts the knowing tone of portent that I so dislike (“this would be the last time she did blah, blah, blah”), and which undermines the tension rather than heighten it.

But my greatest objection is how the story resolves. Toward the end, three important characters reverse themselves, which I don’t believe, and what’s more, they do it in a twinkling, while the narrative tells the reader how they feel. I wonder whether the author wanted a quick, redemptive finish, instead of staying with the heart-breaking dilemma she’d so carefully crafted.

Still, I recommend When the World Was Young, an excellent novel about the loss of innocence.

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

Facing Life After So Much Death: The Heroes’ Welcome

04 Thursday Jun 2015

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Review: The Heroes’ Welcome, by Louisa Young
Harper Perennial, 2015. 263 pp. $15

The Great War has ended only five months before, and Riley Purefoy bears its scars in the most obvious spot: At the Somme, part of his jaw was blown away. Reconstructive surgery has worked marvels, yet children flee from him, he can’t speak clearly, and must drink his tea from a brass tube. Nevertheless, his prewar sweetheart, Nadine Waveney, marries him, trusting to their mutual honesty and understanding to carry them through. No physical wound can obscure from Nadine the kind, courageous, caring man beneath, and she served as a nurse, after all–though she worries, to herself, whether he’ll ever be able to kiss her or make love. The newlyweds’ parents don’t know what shocks them most: Riley’s appearance, that the young couple married without telling them, or that they married at all. Isn’t it obvious Riley’s in no condition to be anyone’s husband or provider? And what of their class differences, since she comes from money, and he, from nothing?

Before-and-after pictures of Walter Yeo, British sailor wounded at Jutland, 1917. He is said to be the first patient to receive reconstructive facial surgery. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Before-and-after pictures of Walter Yeo, wounded British sailor, 1917. He is said to be the first patient to receive plastic surgery. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, his close friend and commanding officer, Peter Locke, has returned from war outwardly whole but a psychological wreck, victim of what today would be called post-traumatic stress. He drinks constantly, has recurrent nightmares about the men he commanded who died in battle, and shuts himself away from his wife, Julia, and their toddler son, Tom. He’s a hard case, Peter, but Julia’s too shallow and self-absorbed to help him. Having sensed their growing estrangement during the war, she decided that she, and not the stress of war, must be the cause, and applied carbolic acid to her face as a beauty treatment. Naturally, she doesn’t get the results she wanted.

The juxtaposition of the two disfigured characters, one of whom can see inside himself and others, while the other sees only surfaces, is a brilliant stroke. It’s one of many in this excruciatingly painful, tender, lyrical, and, by turns, uplifting novel. All four main characters, plus Peter’s cousin Rose, a maternal woman who thinks her role is to pick up the pieces that others let drop, have well-drawn inner lives.

Nadine and Riley come across most clearly, and their wakening to one another and the world where beauty and love for life still exist makes for a satisfyingly real romance. For those interested in such things, Nadine means “hope,” and Riley, “courageous,” while Purefoy suggests the French for “pure faith.” (Contrast with the Malfoys of Harry Potter fame.) Nadine and Riley live up to their names, but only with struggle. Riley hates even the suggestion of pity and is so determined to accept nothing that could even remotely imply charity that he tries the patience of everyone who cares for him. As for Peter and Julia, they’re not finished with each other, despite what it looks like, though it take a while for even a glimmer of hope to show itself.

The Heroes’ Welcome makes difficult reading, at times. The grimness of Riley’s appearance and prospects hit hard, early, putting the reader in the parents’ and in-laws’ places, seeing him for the first time since his wound. Peter’s nightmares are duly horrific, and his behavior hard to take. But I sensed a wave of warmth, compassion, and zest for life gently lapping at the characters’ pain, so that their suffering is by no means all you see. As Nadine observes about art treasures she visits on her honeymoon to Italy:

 

This educational voyage, arranged by a most knowledgeable guide, was peeling mud and sorrow off her soul. She remembered suddenly, one morning, wounded soldiers arriving from the battlefields after days of travel caked in mud, in a dried-out carapace that had to be chipped off them . . . a clay shell like a gypsy’s roasted hedgehog, and God knows what wounds and damage you’d find inside. Every day the cities and the paintings exposed to her long, deep unities of humanity, strong living channels that emerged from the depths of the past like crystal streams bursting from a cavern.

 

Such lyrical prose, with frequent, ironic metaphors (facing facts, or putting a good face on things), is another satisfaction of this terrific novel. I highly recommend it.

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

How Historical Accuracy Matters: Madeleine’s War

01 Monday Jun 2015

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Review: Madeleine’s War, by Peter Watson
Doubleday, 2015. 367 pp. $27

It’s spring 1944, and Matthew Hammond, a colonel in British intelligence, has a torrid romance with the strikingly beautiful Madeleine Dirac, a French-Canadian woman he’s training for a very dangerous assignment. To prepare for the Allied invasion of France, rumored to be imminent, Madeleine will parachute into the country to help coordinate Resistance attacks on German transport and communications. Her survival chances are fifty-fifty, at best, so Matt can only hope that he’s taught the woman he loves the skills she’ll need to make it through.

Watson, who has written social and intellectual history and a couple novels, has taken a risk here. To tell this story, he’s abandoned both the nuts-and-bolts of Allied intelligence operations in France and its historical record, of which other fictional accounts include Simon Mawer’s Trapeze, Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers, and Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers. Such a departure can work, so long as the fiction feels compelling, fresh, authentic, and logical within itself. Depict deep characters whose struggles strike a chord, and it will matter less that the nuts and bolts don’t quite fit the historical template. Unfortunately, however, Madeleine’s War goes in the other direction, toward the ordinary, the predictable, the cliché.

Jacket photo Patricia Turner/Arcangel Images (Courtesy Nan Talese/Doubleday)

Jacket photo Patricia Turner/Arcangel Images (Courtesy Nan Talese/Doubleday)

Col. Hammond’s organization, SC2, is supposedly modeled after the Special Operations Executive, or SOE. But SC2 has peculiar ways of winning the war. Madeleine’s job interview consists of a night drop over the English countryside, which, as she soon learns, entails interrogation as a potential enemy agent, during which she’s stripped naked. (Never mind that as an untrained parachutist, she could have broken her neck, or that a soldier could have shot her, causing a security leak and a needless death.) The “mission” tells Matt all he wants to know, including her bra size, but does she resent being humiliated and turned into a sex object? No. During training in Scotland, Madeleine throws herself at him, finding further opportunities to remove her clothes. How, you may ask, does Matt have the time to train agents–only four at a crack, to boot–when he should be in London managing operations? Then again, how does anyone in SC2, let alone a senior officer, conduct an affair without getting court-martialed? Matt and Madeleine aren’t even discreet, taking a walk on a beach and a bicycle outing. Yet nobody raises an eyebrow, lending further evidence that this allegedly top-secret military operation is really a summer camp with occasional brisk exercise.

Consequently, the narrative must work overtime so that Matt and Madeleine can be together. The setup also allows Matt to narrate the rest of the novel from his office, denying the reader the chance to see Madeleine in action or even hear her own voice. It’s his war, not hers.

That pushes all the chips onto the romance, and it’s a bad bet. These people come straight out of a male fantasy in which the woman is gorgeous, undemanding, vivacious, and always willing, while (to reveal the predictable) the man has the chance to rescue her. That she’s something of a ninny–she admires Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s propaganda filmmaker, as “an opportunist”–doesn’t seem to matter.

Matt’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, himself. He constantly states the obvious and amazes himself and others with it, so that they come off no brighter than he is. But that’s partly because of the author’s narrative technique: In scene after scene, one character lectures another to advance the plot or reveal their past, often to say what they should both already know. And considering the security breaches that occur on virtually every page, if these people had actually led British intelligence, the Germans would have driven the Normandy invasion back into the Channel.

Which brings me to my final point, the novel’s trivial conception of espionage. To name only one example, when an ace agent of SC2 returns from two years in the field, Matt notices that he has a pock-marked face and a congenital stoop. It’s as if Matt has never seen him before–odd, if he trained the man–but it’s his reaction that matters here. The spymaster thinks, How brilliant; our agent is so obviously unathletic, unfit for military service, and that’s why the Germans thought him harmless.

But if the SOE had actually given this man a field assignment, he’d have posed an immediate risk to himself and others. An agent had to be fit, to conduct operations and stand a greater chance of escape, if necessary. His or her best–only–protection was to blend into the population. This fellow would have stuck out in any crowd, and the Gestapo would have spotted him right away. The word harmless wasn’t in their lexicon. They terrified a continent because they assumed that anyone could turn traitor, at any moment–and they’d be there when it happened.

That fear never shapes Madeleine’s War, never reaches the reader. I simply couldn’t connect with these shallow characters and their far-fetched actions and motives.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher, in return for an honest review.