Monthly Archives: November 2015

Aquarius Rising: Pompeii

30 Monday Nov 2015

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Review: Pompeii, by Robert Harris
Random House, 2005. 278 pp. $15

About halfway through this ingenious novel set in late August, 79 C.E., the corrupt villain tells the incorruptible hero, “Here’s a piece of advice for you, my friend: there’s no safer investment than property in Pompeii.”

"Vesuvius from Portici," by Joseph Wright of Derby, eighteenth century (Public domain, courtesy Titanic News Channel).

Vesuvius from Portici, by Joseph Wright, 18th-century English painter (Public domain, courtesy Titanic News Channel).

The reader cringes at the irony, but neither party to this conversation realizes that within days–hours–Vesuvius will erupt and bury the town in pumice, ash, and molten rock. It’s testament to Harris’s skill that he fashions a much-storied historical event almost two millennia old into an edge-of-your-seat thriller, despite certain elements common to the genre and therefore predictable. How does he do it? By going against the grain.

Harris could have focused on the victims, playing on their ignorance, innocence, and tragedy. There’s nothing wrong with that–we can all imagine unseen terrors striking us down–but Harris goes the other way. He shows the Pompeiians at their worst, whether the scheming politicians, the astonishingly greedy villain, his feckless friends and relations, or the townspeople, brutal, superstitious, and quick to anger.

This setup gives the author wider scope. Not only does he ratchet up the tension over whether the evil will perish along with the good, his premise opens several roads to explore. One is the thirst for money (a metaphor of double meaning here). Another compares nature’s cruelty to the human variety; to no surprise, nature comes out the better, because its ravages imply no intent. But that proposition, which (a) has implications for what civilization means; and (b) suggests a random universe, troubles these Romans. As rulers of the known world, they assume their moral superiority and humanity, while as polytheists, they worry about offending capricious gods, so that there’s no such thing as a random act. However, not all Romans in this novel accept these common beliefs. Pliny the Elder, in these pages a vivid, significant character, sets higher store by observation than what Vulcan may or may not be up to beneath Vesuvius.

So does the protagonist, Marcus Attilius. He’s a newly appointed aquarius, or engineer, who serves the Aqua Augusta, the aqueduct that supplies the region with water. Attilius possesses several virtues on which ancient Romans prided themselves: honesty, courage, willingness to work hard for the common good, and the energy to sweat the details. Coming from a long line of aquarii, he discounts Vulcan’s wrath as the reason for a mysterious break in the Aqua Augusta and its pervasive odor of sulfur. But whatever the cause, it’s his job to repair the aqueduct and solve the mystery before the public realizes their water supply has failed.

Trouble is, Ampliatus, the real estate magnate full of sage investment advice, has been building splendid baths in Pompeii, and he sees a large, illegal fortune to be made in water. (As a former slave who works rather too hard to enrich himself and burnish his reputation, he’s aptly named, for ampliatus means “to widen,” “to enlarge,” or “to glorify”.) He quickly recognizes that Attilius will oppose him and takes steps to have him removed. Nobody will be surprised to hear that Ampliatus has a daughter, Corelia, whose beauty, sensitivity, and generous heart smite the stoic engineer between the eyes. Harris does tweak that cliché, though, loosening up his priggish protagonist as the novel proceeds, a nice touch. But Vesuvius, naturally, will have the last word over all petty, human affairs, which makes a normal engineering project a very tense activity.

Harris has also researched his ground, to great effect. The houses feel lived in, the streets vibrant, and, important to a story like this, the engineering worthy of awe. I learned that the aqueduct builders sloped their pipelines a small, precise distance every hundred yards–roughly, the thickness of a human finger. Any less, and the water remained stagnant; any more, and the current destroyed the masonry. What a metaphor for the business of state or survival–a hair’s breadth off, and life ends, history changes.

Like An Officer and a Spy, Harris’s superb novel about the Dreyfus Affair (reviewed March 9), Pompeii hews to events as they happened, yet still astonishes. If you read historical thrillers sparingly and prefer a deeper, more complex novel, try An Officer and a Spy first. But both will reward you.

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

An Existential Warrior: Sword of Honor

23 Monday Nov 2015

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Review: Sword of Honor, by David Kirk
Doubleday, 2015. 441 pp. $27

Musashi Miyamoto, the young protagonist of this absorbing, far-ranging novel (and a real seventeenth-century figure), walks away after the battle of Sekigahara, determined to live. For this revolutionary decision, which the samurai code calls the height of dishonor, Musashi becomes an outlaw.

Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor for Doubleday.

Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor for Doubleday.

Three transgressions make the young man’s life forfeit. First, he fought for a lord on the losing side, for which Musashi should have committed seppuku, ritual suicide. However, he’s long detested that custom and goes into hiding instead. Second, he’s accused of having insulted a warrior from a powerful clan whom he slew in single combat, a charge he denies, to no avail. Thirdly, and most significantly, he announces to all and sundry that seppuku is criminal nonsense; that the samurai code, known to initiates as “the Way,” is morally false; and that any man who kills for a cause other than his own–as when a lord commands him to–is a coward. Not content with that, Musashi takes these views on the road, trying to prevent seppuku when he happens across it, and fending off the samurai despatched to kill him.

In other hands, perhaps, this arresting premise would merely provide excuses for grisly combat, of which there’s no shortage here, or an adventure story that makes the pages turn rapidly, as these do. But Kirk has much bigger psychological, political, and moral game in mind, and his epic sweep, focus on justice, and using a specific case to portray an entire society remind me of Kurosawa films like Rashomon or Seven Samurai. Throughout the novel, characters constantly challenge themselves and others to define what the purpose of violence is, and what an individual person is to make of that.

As a fellow fugitive from the Way haltingly observes:

What difference, what individual difference, did you and I make at Sekigahara? . . . Yet our army lost, and so we two must bear the shame. To be hated. What if our army had won? We would be loved, and yet we would have had the exact same effect upon the victory. Would have had . . . what we had before. But magnified. And what would we have done to earn it? Nothing. No. No. It is as though we . . . as though human beings are . . . buckets or, or, or . . . vessels.

Yet nothing’s so simple. Musashi sees no other choice–indeed, he seeks no other–than to prove by the sword that the Way is bankrupt. The contradiction is obvious, but not to Musashi, who believes he’s honest because he fights only for himself and his ideals. He assumes that each martial victory will convince other samurai to abandon the Way, and he’s astounded when they respond by trying to attack him.

But there’s more. The samurai sent to kill him, Akiyama, is himself an outcast, and Kirk exploits that, leading Akiyama to question why he’s been sent on this mission, and what, precisely, is the moral threat that his quarry represents. Along the way, Musashi lands with a blind woman and a young girl who challenge his assumptions, and among whom he becomes a different person from the raging swordsman who enjoys the combat at which he’s preternaturally gifted.

Is there yet more? Yes, there is. Musashi’s quest brings him to Kyoto, where an uneasy peace simmers with conflict. The Tokugawa Shogunate, the victors of Sekigahara, have moved the capital to Edo (modern-day Tokyo) and left behind a military governor. Many people in Kyoto resent the Tokugawa for that, perhaps none more than the Yoshioka, a famous samurai school. It’s their champion whom Musashi allegedly insulted at the battle, and they’re a political power in the city. Staying out of trouble is therefore a full-time job for Musashi, and he’s no good at it.

Sword of Honor follows Child of Vengeance, which I reviewed December 8, 2014. Each stands on its own, though the precursor shows how Musashi has always had a dual nature, with healing impulses as well as violent ones. Sword of Honor is a deeper, more proficient novel, though, and I’m glad to see that Kirk has taken to showing his characters’ emotions more often than telling them, a flaw that marred the previous book at times. I could have done with fewer, less grisly battle scenes, but none seemed gratuitous, and there’s no denying that the samurai world, as with any knightly class, was based on violence.

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

Judicial Murder: The Hours Count

16 Monday Nov 2015

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Review: The Hours Count, by Jillian Cantor
Riverhead, 2015. 356 pp. $27

In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the electric chair, accused of conspiracy to commit espionage, the only American civilians ever to pay with their lives for that crime. The FBI charged Julius with having passed atomic secrets to the Soviets, and Ethel, with having typed up the papers. The case rested on a confession by Ethel’s brother, an apparent plea bargain for which he served ten years in prison. Decades later, he admitted that the prosecution had encouraged him to implicate Ethel in order to save his wife, and that he had lied to do so.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg immediately after their conviction, 1951 (Roger Higgins, New York World-Telegram and the Sun, public domain by gift to the Library of Congress)

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg immediately after their conviction, 1951 (Roger Higgins, New York World-Telegram and the Sun, public domain by gift to the Library of Congress).

The Hours Count is a deeply disturbing novel that compels the reader to care about these doomed people, victims of a national hysteria that Cantor captures to a T. Moreover, she does so by threading politics lightly through her narrative until the last few chapters, underlining how the hysteria snowballed, catching the Rosenbergs (and just about everyone else) by surprise. Cantor conveys all this by focusing on the Rosenbergs’ loving marriage, dedication to their children, and ordinary kindness and generosity. In the milieu she creates, it defies imagination that Ethel could have been a spy, known that her husband was, or that they should have been electrocuted when all the other convicted defendants went to jail.

Cantor tells her story through Millie Stein, a down-the-hall neighbor of the Rosenbergs who sees her friend Ethel as a person much like herself, beset with day-to-day problems of caring for children, managing on an ever-tighter budget, and ignoring vicious insults from godawful relatives. For instance, if a child misbehaves or, as in Millie’s son’s case, hasn’t learned to talk by age three, it’s obviously the mother’s fault. Her mother and mother-in-law, among others, point the phrase why can’t you be like ____? at Millie like a weapon, and she feels isolated and friendless. What a superb metaphor: Even before the FBI comes knocking, there’s already an inquisition going on, and her family are the hooded judges, from whose indictment there’s no appeal. It’s as if the government or American society were a family, and the real enemy within are the opportunistic vigilantes, whether they’re J. Edgar Hoover or your grudge-holding siblings.

Millie’s dilemma, once she can no longer ignore the illogical, even nonsensical, events that take place around her–including her brutish, Russian husband’s peculiar work habits–is what to do and whom to trust. She wants to do the right thing, but it’s hard to tell what that is. As a naive, unsophisticated narrator, she can’t help believing that she’s to blame for her child’s tantrums and inability to talk, and in her yearning to help him, Millie makes some bad choices. For one, the reader knows long before she does that the psychotherapist who purports to treat her boy has another, very different agenda in mind, which includes seducing her.

That’s a literary pet peeve of mine, therapists who sleep with their patients. Yes, I know it happens in real life, and Millie craves the kindness her husband refuses to give her, so she’s a ready target. But the pervasive stereotype of the predatory, manipulative doctor of the mind is yet another form of hysteria, and though it serves Cantor’s plot, there are problems with it here.

One is Millie’s credulousness, which seems extreme. It takes her forever and a day to figure out the real sources of trouble, and once she does, she keeps trusting the wrong people. I wanted her to have more backbone, or at least a better head on her shoulders.

I also question the author’s decision to split up the chapter describing the executions and dole it out in pieces. We already know the Rosenbergs will die; in fact, the first line of the book jacket says so. Historical fiction about well-known events rests on the telling, at which Cantor does beautifully. Why, then, in the first chapter, does Millie attempt to get into Sing Sing the fatal night (which, the author admits, is highly improbable) and influence the proceedings? The vague portents mentioned in this chapter achieve nothing, in my view.

Just tell the story and have the confidence that the reader will follow. The Hours Count is one that demands to be read.

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

Racism in a Blackened Face: A Free State

09 Monday Nov 2015

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Review: A Free State, by Tom Piazza
HarperCollins, 2015. 235 pp. $26

Blackface minstrel shows draw great crowds in 1850s Philadelphia. However, the competition among performing troupes is so fierce that today’s sensation may be ho-hum tomorrow, which forces a continuous, obsessive search for novelty. To keep up, James Douglass, performer-manager of the Virginia Minstrels (none of whom hail from that state), takes a bold step. He happens on a street musician who plays the best banjo he’s ever heard, and the accompanying dance is equally impressive. The virtuoso vanishes before Douglass can talk to him, but the manager tracks down Henry Sims and offers him the chance to perform with the Virginia Minstrels.

A publicity poster for Billy Van's blackface act, Strobridge Litho Co., 1900 (Courtesy Library of Congress)

A publicity poster for Billy Van’s blackface act, Strobridge Litho Co., 1900 (Courtesy Library of Congress)

However, Henry is black, which complicates matters in three ways, only the first of which Douglass recognizes right off. By law, African-Americans are barred from playing before white audiences, so Douglass has to employ a subterfuge. Since Henry has light eyes and copper-colored skin, Douglass decides to pass him off as “Spanish,” and have him black his face like the rest of the troupe. But Douglass doesn’t realize that Henry is a runaway slave who risks his freedom by appearing in public and makes anyone shielding him liable for prosecution under the Fugitive Slave Act. Finally, of course, Douglass is hiring a black man to mock his own race in words and music that condone slavery, a contradiction that gradually comes to trouble him.

Piazza takes this fascinating premise further by casting the music itself as a form of internal freedom for those who play it, white or black, a dreamlike barrier between themselves and the harsh, exterior world. Secondly, though he shows Henry’s servitude in all its harshness, you also see the happier moments, either in his fond memories of the family he left behind or his feelings about learning to play his instrument. (It’s worth noting, though, that he’s a former house slave, not a field hand.) In other words, Piazza argues that to portray blackface solely as a groundless misrepresentation of slave life misses an important point: that slaves who delight in music and dance do so not because they enjoy their fate, as their audience believes, but as a joyful release from it, the only expression they’re allowed. As Douglass, who senses this without connecting the dots, observes:

Even the sad songs–here was the mystery–were enlivening. We had heard jigs, we had heard ballads, we knew polkas and reels. But these Negro songs combined pathos and grandeur in the same taste; gaiety and tragedy wore not separate masks but the same mask. The arrangements compelled your feet to move, lifted you. Nothing like it had been heard in the history of the world.

Unfortunately, A Free State does too little with this material. The narrative rests mostly on the story–a slave-catcher has come to Philadelphia to find Henry and bring him back to the plantation, dead or alive. It’s a gripping situation, told with brisk economy, and despite an ending I can only describe as peculiar, the narrative held my interest completely, not least the passages about music, which the author plainly loves and understands. But I think his premise deserves more.

To begin with, the reader learns mere scraps about the characters, who seem credible, but that’s about it. For example, I can readily believe that Douglass, who grew up with an abusive father and ran away to join the circus, would find freedom and an escape in music. But he doesn’t draw me in any further (nor do I understand what Piazza means by evoking Frederick Douglass in his name). Henry’s an unusual former slave (witness a taste for Dickens and an ability to drive a hard bargain with a white employer), but he’s a puzzle too, visible mostly in the ways in which he confounds everyone who meets him. Curiously, the deepest character is Tull, the slave catcher, whose natural brutality and bigotry feel bred in the bone, yet he recounts less of the narrative than the other two.

I wish A Free State had lived up to its premise.

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

The End of an Era: The Passing Bells

02 Monday Nov 2015

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Review: The Passing Bells, by Phillip Rock
Morrow, 1978. 516 pp. $16

As my regular readers have probably figured out by now, I seldom pick up a family saga. Normally, when I scan the library shelves for historical fiction, I avoid those novels whose jacket illustration shows a beautiful woman standing in front of a magnificent ancestral home. Not that I have anything against such novels; I simply sense that they weren’t written with me in mind.

However, The Passing Bells is about the First World War, my historical specialty and favorite subject as a novelist. I’ve also read that the late Phillip Rock knew his stuff, and that he chose his title from the first line of Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” suggests as much. So I gave the book a shot.

Heaton Hall, Manchester, England (Courtesy PublicDomainPictures.net).

Heaton Hall, Manchester, England (Courtesy Public DomainPictures.net).

There’s a lot to like about The Passing Bells, the first novel of a trilogy. Rock indeed portrays the England of 1914 and after with a keen grasp of history, issues, and, most visibly in this book, social prejudices. The Grevilles of Abingdon Pryory, an earldom created in Tudor times, wear their superiority like their perfectly tailored formal clothes and need not reflect on their values, outlook, way of life, or how they treat others. In other words, they’re absolutely insufferable and likely to remain so.

Rock’s narrative argues that the Greville mindset typifies what holds England back from political, social, or scientific progress. Come the war, this thinking is particularly disastrous, for its aristocratic purveyors see nothing wrong with sending legions of Britons to the ugliest deaths imaginable so long as the enemy pays a commensurate price. The old trope that the men who fought that war were lions led by donkeys is on display here, to potent effect. You see it not only at Gallipoli and the Somme, but among staff officers safely in England or behind the lines in France. Rock’s war is that of self-inflicted wounds, hopeless attacks, and overwhelmed aid stations; the nursing scenes are particularly gripping and true to life.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As the novel opens in the late spring of 1914, Martin Rilke, Lady Greville’s journalist nephew from Chicago, visits Abingdon Pryory before setting out on a brief Continental tour, reporter’s notebook in hand. He’s warm, open, loud, and very badly dressed, just what you’d expect an American to be, swimming in a sea of blue-bloods. Martin’s also got more on his mind than the subject that transfixes everyone else: who’s going to marry which spoiled, gorgeous, young woman, and whether the stuffy, old earl will allow the match. (It’s telling, though, that Martin’s eye immediately falls on a pretty housemaid, newly hired and worried about losing her job; apparently, she’s got too much character to transform herself into the liveried robot her station requires.)

Over the coming weeks, war draws closer, and life as the Grevilles know it is about to end. Nobody can say exactly what’s in the air, but in London, Martin senses it:

It appeared to Martin that the streets of the city never emptied. . . .Perhaps it was no more than the unusually hot weather that drove people, mainly young men, from their rooms and set them to wandering in restless bands through the West End. The groups were orderly–excessively polite, as a matter of fact–and the police were not concerned. It was almost Bank Holiday time and a certain anticipatory excitement was normal. And yet, somehow, this behavior could not be explained that easily.

What I don’t like about The Passing Bells is the two-dimensional characterizations. Only a handful of a large cast show any depth, and only two or three can be said to have inner lives. Martin’s a very nice guy, but once he corrects his wardrobe, he’s got no flaws to speak of. The earl’s attitudes ring shudderingly true, but there’s little humanity to him, even when he knows nobody’s watching. His daughter, Alexandra, remains a ravishingly beautiful twit until she becomes a nurse, but that takes half the book; ditto the dashing Coldstream Guards captain who acquires substance (and a conscience) only after he sees combat.

As a consequence, it’s hard to care about these people. But The Passing Bells does depict the time very well.

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