Monthly Archives: July 2015

Slices of Life After Death: Wake

27 Monday Jul 2015

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Review: Wake, by Anna Hope
Random House, 2014. 293 pp. $26

You might think that the four-day runup to Armistice Day, 1920, in London, and the burial of the Unknown Warrior that took place, would make a thin premise for a novel. After all, what tension could there be in a public funeral? Moreover, the unidentified soldier, exhumed from a battlefield in northern France, has been dead for years and belongs to no one in particular.

Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, Westminster Abbey, London (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, Westminster Abbey, London (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

But he also belongs to anyone who suffered loss, which is to say, the whole nation. And as with any intimate, familial funeral, the coming ritual stirs fear, jealousy, pain, renewed grief, and fury, as well as harrowed hearts longing for release. Wake turns the national day of mourning into a family affair, one of many families. For most, loss has stunted them and left them unable to love or even venture outside their fears. Naturally, their paths cross in unusual ways.

There’s Evelyn, who works for the pension office. It’s an utterly thankless job, but she’s not looking for fulfillment. Her lover died in the war, and her younger brother, the only kindred spirit within the family, has returned from France a brittle wreck. He scorns Evelyn for being bitter, and maybe she is. But she also speaks of the anger that can’t go anywhere, because nobody will listen:

Someone should do the world a favor. They should take one of those great guns that they wheel out for the occasion and turn it around; they should train it on the massed dignitaries at the Cenotaph, in the abbey, on the king and Lloyd George and Haig and the whole lot of them, should shoot them while they sit there, their old heads bent in prayer. . . . Hypocrites, stinking hypocrites all.

There’s also Ada, who can’t quite believe her son is dead and sees his face in every crowd. Or Hettie, who makes sixpence a dance at a dance hall, and whose brother remains so shocked from the trenches that he seldom speaks or leaves his armchair.

I wasn’t surprised to read that author Hope once trained to be an actress, for her narrative often has a theatrical feel, clipping along in short scenes. She’s got an economical style, suggesting more than she shows. But cutting away before things get too complex sometimes feels like a bailout, and it restricts what you can see of her characters. This is especially true of the men, who appear to exist only in the moment, only on the surface.

By contrast, Wake portrays the women very well, showing how the war left them behind, in several ways. Evelyn curses the old soldiers who act as if they own the streets, the war, and its legacy. No matter what women did, or still do, they count for nothing by comparison, and all they hear is that their aspirations can and should go no further than having a husband and children. Without soapboxes or drumbeats, Wake vividly conveys this feminist rage, every ounce of which feels earned. Likewise, the class conflict between officers and “other ranks” comes through loud and clear, a truth that the praying hypocrites refuse to acknowledge.

On the downside, the crossed-paths aspect of Wake falls short. Hope’s a skillful storyteller, so the narrative fits together, but a few crossings feel contrived, and the coincidences mount up. Two are predictable, one of which she borrowed (perhaps unwittingly) from For King and Country, my favorite film about the war, starring Tom Courtenay and Dirk Bogarde. I don’t fault her for this–all novelists borrow–and you might as well take from the best.

What I do object to is the attitude, universal in Wake, that, once the expected glory had faded by mid-1916, nobody in Britain fought except from fear of punishment. What nonsense. Unlike the case with France or Russia, Britain’s initial allies, no mutiny ever took place among British forces, and support remained strong for a war that barely touched England’s shores. Soldiers hated the trenches and, often, the generals, but most believed in the cause, and the reverence that accompanied the burial of the Unknown Warrior stemmed partly from national pride. That the politicians basked in this feeling, as if they’d invented and deserved it, doesn’t mean that the people who fought for them were dupes or slaves.

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

When Fiction Outdoes History: The Moor’s Account

20 Monday Jul 2015

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Review: The Moor’s Account, by Laila Lalami
Pantheon, 2014. 324 pp. $27

It’s a commonplace that the victors write the history. The disastrous Narváez expedition to what the Spanish called La Florida, from which only four men returned after an eight-year odyssey, earned celebrity in the early sixteenth century as a heroic mission to civilize the New World savages. But Lalami’s retelling gives Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, a Moorish slave who accompanies the mission, the voice he never had. The official record mentions him in a phrase, but only by his Spanish name, Estebanico. Here, he has plenty to say, even if he has to swallow most of it in Spanish company, and what a penetrating, profound, and empathic narrator he is. As he remarks of his upbringing, “Silence taught me to observe. Silence made me invisible to those who speak.” That skill both serves him well and saves his life on more than one occasion.

In the early 1520s, Mustafa, once a successful merchant in Azuremma, Morocco, sells himself into slavery to provide money for his mother, brothers, and sister. The hard times have followed European conquest, but, as with everything else in Lalami’s astute vision, there’s always more to say. At one level, how Mustafa comes to his fateful decision, and what happens after his master resells him in 1527 to a captain participating in the Narváez expedition, makes a page-turning adventure of great pathos. But in the process, Lalami also shows what slavery, greed, and colonialism look like, and how much farther they reach than it at first appears.

Panfilo de Narvaez (Courtesy Wikemedia Commons).

Panfilo de Narvaez (Courtesy Wikemedia Commons).

Exhibit A is of course the Spanish conquerors, especially Narváez, a selfish, proud, pig-headed leader who makes terrible decisions that he then tries to spin. (Politics doesn’t change, even if the politicians do.) However, his captains are little better, and their collective fixation on gold brings about catastrophe, for themselves and the native peoples unlucky enough to live in their path. Among the possessions the Spanish steal, Estebanico notices, are place names, as if their identity has somehow changed at Spanish whim, as accurate and pithy a description of colonialism as there is. And as he notes, his masters have stolen his identity as well, which makes him determined to cling to his real self, at least in his own head, where they can’t touch him.

But in a brilliant stroke, Lalami turns the tables: His real self has committed the same sins as the Spanish, if on a smaller scale. He recognizes, for example, that greed caused his own downfall as a merchant, that he sold others into slavery for quick profit, and that his ancestors conquered Azuremma and colonized it. Further, he comes to understand that his efforts to stay alive and return home–the dream that keeps him going–may bring unseen consequences to others. Late in the novel, he laments, “Would I ever be able to stir a finger without bringing harm to somebody?”

It’s this voice of conscience, delivered firmly but without breast-beating, that makes The Moor’s Account so penetrating. Not only does trying to do the right thing–or even figuring out what the right thing is–up the tension, the humility that Mustafa strives for forces me to consider my own life more carefully.

I often lamented the wicked turns my life had taken, but I rarely considered how much I had to be thankful for, how I had survived so long where so many others had perished, how I had seen wonders that no other Zamori [native of Azuremma] had. Had even Ibn Battuta [a famed traveler and chronicler] witnessed the things, both terrible and wondrous, that I had seen?

Read The Moor’s Account. Maybe you too will be moved to reflect.

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

Laughter and Pain: Paradise Sky

13 Monday Jul 2015

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Review: Paradise Sky, by Joe R. Lansdale
Mulholland/Little, Brown, 2015. 400 pp. $26

Now, in the living of my life, I’ve killed deadly men and dangerous animals and made love to four Chinese women, all of them on the same night and in the same wagon bed, and one of them with a wooden leg, which made things a mite difficult from time to time. I even ate some of a dead fellow once when I was crossing the plains, though I want to rush right in here and make it clear I didn’t know him all that well. . . . it all come about by a misunderstanding.

 

So begins Paradise Sky, as darkly funny, searing, and engaging a tall tale as you could want. The narrator is Willie, growing up in Reconstruction-era Texas, a dangerous, terrifying place for a young black man. Willie’s troubles begin when his eyes linger on a white woman’s rear end while she’s hanging up the wash: Her husband, a homicidal fool named Ruggert, proclaims that Willie raped her and should swing for it. Willie wants to laugh it off, and if he were white, he could have, particularly given the woman involved. But the situation is deadly serious, and if there’s a lesson in this novel, it’s that the Ruggerts of the world are unreachable (a painful fact underlined by the recent murders in Charleston). Innocent people die because of Ruggert’s mania, including Willie’s father, and the young man must flee.

However, the charm of this novel is that no matter how bleak, or even tragic, the circumstance, humor’s never far behind, sometimes neck-and-neck. I can’t remember the last time a novel made me laugh so hard. Earthy metaphors flavor the narrative, as with one description of Ruggert, “who latched on to notions like a thirsty tick and wasn’t happy until he had sucked all the blood out of them.” Another character smelled of onions, liquor, and “mating skunk,” while a third was such a gifted tracker, he could “follow a ghost in moccasins.” But the funniest part is the dead-pan absurdity. I knew I wanted to be a writer when, as a teenager, I read James Thurber. Lansdale’s got a different sensibility, yet his characters share one Thurberesque quality: They swim in their sense of the ridiculous, as though it were perfectly natural.

But back to our story. Willie finds a haven in an unlikely place, a farm belonging to a former preacher who served in the Confederate Army alongside Ruggert. But Nate Loving, the farmer, is himself unusual, having decided that a belief in racial superiority makes no more sense than the Scripture commonly cited to justify it, and so has no further use for either. Nate teaches Willie everything he knows about riding, shooting, gardening, and the constellations, which is, as Nate might say himself, a pretty fair piece of knowledge. However, Ruggert eventually catches on where Willie has gone, and so the fugitive flees once more, taking the name Nat Love as tribute to the white man who was like a father to him.

The real Nate Love, the inspiration for the novel (Courtesy blackpast.org).

The real Nate Love, the inspiration for the novel (Courtesy blackpast.org).

Nat learns many trades during his adventures, none of which he might have figured on as a career–soldier, bouncer, spittoon-emptier, and rat-killer, to name some. He befriends Wild Bill Hickok, enters a shooting contest, and falls in love–and all three activities are related. But Nat’s fame and accomplishments can’t protect him from the race prejudice that’s all around, or Ruggert’s tireless efforts to track him down.

If you read Paradise Sky–and of course, I recommend that you do–don’t read the jacket flap, which is practically a complete synopsis. And ignore the discussions about religion, which, though they fit the time and story, can be tendentious, especially if you’re not Christian. Luckily, they’re brief.

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

Annotating Others’ Lives: The Minimalist

06 Monday Jul 2015

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Review: The Miniaturist, by Jessie Burton
HarperCollins, 2014. 400 pp. $27

Eighteen-year-old Petronella Oortman has left her small Dutch town for Amsterdam and marriage to a wealthy, much older businessman she has barely met. Nella, as she’s called, could have done much worse. She comes from an old, respected family, but her father has gone bankrupt, and, considering that women have no power to make their own lives, a good marriage is all Nella can hope for. Since Johannes Brandt ranks among the merchant princes of Amsterdam, the world capital of trade in the late seventeenth century, she has instantly achieved a status to be envied.

Petronella Oortman's doll's house, anonymous craftsman, 1686-1710. Petronella and her husband, Johannes, were real historical figures (Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

Petronella Oortman’s doll’s house, anonymous craftsman, 1686-1710. Petronella and her husband, Johannes, were real historical figures (Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

But that’s not how she feels entering her new home. Her husband isn’t even there to greet her, and when he does show up, he seems indifferent. Johannes doesn’t even assert his conjugal rights, about which Nella has mixed feelings. She longs for affection and warmth, but her mother has lectured her about the pains and discomforts of marriage, to be dutifully endured, because that’s a woman’s role. However, it’s not just Johannes who slights her. Nella’s sister-in-law, Marin, finds fault with everything the bride says or does, as if she resents her brother marrying, especially that one.

Yet there’s much more to Marin, a woman who keeps maps, souvenirs from the Far East, and business ledgers in her bedroom, and treats her brother as if he were a greenhorn at trade.

Marin starts to shift in Nella’s mind. From her drab black clothes, Marin rises like a phoenix, enveloped in her nutmeg scent–no lily for her, no floral nicety. Covered in the symbols of the city, Marin is a daughter of its power–she is a secret surveyor of maps, an annotator of specimens–an annotator of something else as well, not so easy to slot into a category.

Indeed, Marin isn’t the only manipulator in Nella’s life. Johannes’s wedding gift is a miniature house, inlaid with pewter and tortoise shell, a precise replica of the one they live in. At first, the gift bewilders and angers Nella. By giving her a doll’s house, is Johannes making a not-so-veiled allusion to her youth and the difference between their ages? But to amuse herself (she’s got little else to do), she orders furnishings for the gift house from a miniaturist, who sends her more than she’s ordered, all exact renderings of the inhabitants, dogs included, and the furniture. Each delivery contains a pithy aphorism or exhortation, riddles that leave Nella perplexed.

Only an insider could have created these things with such accuracy. What’s more, as events progress, and Johannes’s business empire shows severe cracks, the miniatures seem to foretell a bleak future, if not ordain it. Who’s watching or pulling the strings?

Normally, I shy away from fiction in which magic plays too great a role, especially as a deus ex machina. But to Burton, magic’s a tool, not a toy, and neither she nor her characters are saying, “Gee whiz, look what I can do!” Rather, The Miniaturist is about freedom, or lack of it, and the willingness to choose a way of life despite what others may think. Burton does an excellent job conveying the social policing through which neighbor watches (and reports on) neighbor, branding ordinary desires as sinful and stamping out individuality. The very creation of a miniature house inlaid with tortoise shell creates tension between a longing for beauty (and to show off) and fear of what others might say, perhaps from jealousy.

In this constrained environment, people are themselves miniatures, closeted in small moral and emotional spaces–invisible prisons, as Johannes calls them. There are secrets within secrets, lies within lies. Through their gradual revelation, Burton uncovers truths about how the world works, especially for women, and what few choices they have. That powerlessness is what Nella and Marin struggle against–Johannes too–and their engrossing story keeps the pages turning.

That said, I wish The Miniaturist went deeper, in two respects. Though I like the way Burton portrays the central characters, with internal conflicts and multiple layers, the town hypocrites, who make briefer appearances, could have worn capital H’s on their clothes. Also, and probably related, the religion feels put on, as if nobody in Amsterdam actually believed that stuff, when of course, they did.

In fact, by staying away from the religious core of Dutch life, I think Burton misses a great opportunity. The entire question of free will is central to Calvinist thought, yet nobody in the novel wrestles with it, except to worry that the civil authorities will punish them. Divine retribution seems far away, and yet in that time and place, it was a real concept.

Still, I enjoyed The Miniaturist and think it deserves its popularity.

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