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Novelhistorian

~ What's new and old in historical fiction

Novelhistorian

Monthly Archives: May 2016

Morality in War: Until the Sea Shall Give Up Her Dead

30 Monday May 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, Britain, characterization, eighteenth century, French Revolution, historical fiction, moral issues, Royal Navy, rules of engagement, S. Thomas Russell

Review: Until the Sea Shall Give Up Her Dead, by S. Thomas Russell
Putnam, 2014. 435 pp. $28

Captain Charles Hayden commands H.M.S. Themis, a frigate patrolling Caribbean waters in 1794, during the French Revolutionary Wars. He serves immediately under Sir William Jones, a captain senior to him, known for bravery and impeccable seamanship but a greed for glory that plunges him into foolish risks, for which others pay with their lives. Hayden must follow Sir William’s lead or be disciplined, and it should be noted that Sir William boasts of friends in high places. But the junior captain is a very different sort of commander, and therein hangs a tale.

Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg's 1795 rendering of Lord Howe's victory the previous year at the Glorious First of June, during the French Revolutionary Wars (Courtesy Wikiwand)

Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s 1795 rendering of Lord Howe’s victory the previous year at the Glorious First of June, during the French Revolutionary Wars (Courtesy Wikiwand)

First of all, when Hayden takes a risk, as he does all the time, he carefully weighs the cost against the likely gain, as any prudent captain would. But Hayden goes further, considering what he’d do in his opponent’s place, taking motives, resources, and sensibilities into account. Even more remarkably, he grants his adversary abilities and conviction equal to his own, typical of his outlook. For similar reasons, he consults his junior officers, to teach them tactics and leadership as well as benefit from what they have to say. Hayden’s therefore a rare commander in any military organization, especially the Royal Navy, which never met a new idea it liked.

But open-mindedness runs up against probabilities and experience, and the Themis quickly tests its captain’s character. Against all odds, the ship picks up two survivors from the open ocean, a pair of Spanish aristocrats, hence nationals of a British ally. However, their story seems so far-fetched that Hayden has to wonder whether these men are whom they claim to be, perhaps spies or criminals. One officer suspects that the younger survivor is effeminate, a dangerous secret, given that the Articles of War punish homosexuality with hanging, though presumably a foreign civilian wouldn’t be subject to the rule. What’s more, this young man gives Hayden advice to heal his injured heart; the captain recently lost the love of his life to another.

So Hayden can hardly be a neutral observer when the gunroom mess discusses the ways men and women differ in their thinking, the first of several moral or ethical questions to enter the narrative. Others include slavery; what’s permissible in war (especially for personal advantage); at what point does an enemy in extremis become a victim to be rescued; and what a commander owes his men, over whom he has the power of life and death.

Grappling with these questions is one pleasure that separates Until the Sea from lesser novels of the genre. True to form, there’s plenty of action, but you never feel it’s just there to keep the narrative rolling. Russell derives tension from several sources, whether Hayden’s misgivings about his orders, the identity of the Spanish gentlemen, or the presence of a crippled slave ship. I also enjoy the dialog, especially the witticisms of a Mr. Hawthorne, lieutenant of marines.

On the downside, I wish Russell plied a more vivid pen. He knows seamanship, and he takes you inside the chess game of naval maneuvers, a pleasure. But he doesn’t reveal the ship itself, whether the cramped quarters, the complex parts, or the visual space in which the characters move and speak. Similarly, it’s a rare passage where the author troubles to portray the sky, the sea, or a port of call:

The city itself was a-hum, trademen’s carts and barrows passing by, planters in their carriages and gigs, dusky-skinned slaves and freemen going about their business, and then the Creoles with their nutmeg skin and striking features–to Hayden’s eye, more handsome than either of the races that spawned them.

I don’t want to sound harsh, because I like this book, and Russell’s a good storyteller. But his prose is serviceable at best, and so are the characterizations. Hayden’s a sympathetic chap, but too much so, as if his liberality and troubled conscience shine like stars in the Caribbean firmament. And too often, Russell tells the reader what Hayden’s like, rather than show him. This is where I have trouble with the ecstatic blurbs on the jacket, which liken Russell to Patrick O’Brian.

I know; I know. The poor man didn’t ask for that, and I can’t blame him for not being somebody else. Nevertheless, I can ask why Russell chose to make Hayden a paragon, when O’Brian isn’t afraid to have his hero, Jack Aubrey, behave at times like a lout or a bigot or a lush. I understand the author’s instinct to protect a protagonist–you want to like him, and you want your readers to do the same. But it’s a better novel when you don’t get in the way.

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

Life Hangs on Chance: City of Secrets

26 Thursday May 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Uncategorized

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1945, anti-Semitism, book review, British Mandate, Haganah, historical fiction, Irgun, Israel, Jews, literary fiction, love, moral complexities, Palestine, romance, Stewart O'Nan, terrorism, thriller, violence

Review: City of Secrets, by Stewart O’Nan
Viking, 2016. 194 pp. $22

Brand, a Latvian survivor of the Holocaust, drives a taxi in Jerusalem in 1945. But that simple statement skips over many complexities. The British are clinging to their mandate over Palestine, refusing entry to dispossessed Jews like Brand and combing the population for illegal immigrants, whom they deport. Consequently, he must live underground, so his papers, taxi, and apartment come courtesy of a revolutionary cell committed to Israeli independence, which knows him only as Jossi. Since even the possession of a weapon is a hanging offense, ferrying his comrades to clandestine rendezvous or military operations puts him in great danger.

Jerusalem, VE Day, May 8, 1945 (Courtesy Matson Photographic Service, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Jerusalem, VE Day, May 8, 1945 (Courtesy Matson Photographic Service, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Naturally, Brand becomes more than a chauffeur, about which he has mixed feelings–repugnance at violence, excitement at wielding power, pride in helping create a Jewish homeland. But as his role widens, he realizes that his cell, which he thought belonged to the Haganah, a comparatively moderate organization, has been taken over by the more violent, provocative Irgun. What holds him together is his love for Eva, a fellow Latvian and cell member, who arouses his jealousy by working as a prostitute to gain information.

From this tense, conflict-ridden premise comes a thriller of remarkable depth and breadth, especially considering how spare it is. The jacket quotes a blurb by Alan Furst, and O’Nan deserves the compliment in more than one way. Not only has he shown the same elegant economy as the best of Furst’s more recent World War II thrillers, he’s pushed the envelope. Rather than have Brand be an expert, O’Nan makes him an amateur who can’t master his risky impulses to retain human connection when the smart money says to shut up and pretend you see nothing. But how could he remain silent, when his wife, parents, grandparents, and sister were all murdered, and when he watched a friend stomped to death in a concentration camp? Brand’s confusion and ambivalence, rather than sangfroid or professional devotion, are what drive the narrative.

As with Furst, City of Secrets tastes of atmosphere:

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. . . . The very stones were secondhand, scavenged and fit back into place haphazardly, their Roman inscriptions inverted. It was the rainy season, and the walls were gray instead of golden, the souks teeming with rats. An east wind thrashed the poplars and olive trees, stirring up trash in cul-de-sacs, rattling windows. He’d lost too much weight during the war and couldn’t get warm.

When Brand goes into action, there’s tension aplenty. But the author also captures tension of a different kind, the everyday variety. Brand must wait for information, which usually comes unexpectedly and never fully enough to satisfy his curiosity. Every drive through Jerusalem means passing British roadblocks, where there’s always a chance he’ll be discovered as an illegal immigrant, or that soldiers will search his car and find what he’s not supposed to have. He craves Eva’s company, but also her love, which she denies him, and which he’s learned never to discuss. Accordingly, every move Brand makes, even if it’s to stay in his apartment, alone, ratchets up the stakes.

City of Secrets manages to suggest much about politics and hatreds without having to narrate them, an admirable part of the economy I mentioned. O’Nan conveys the bitter divisions between the Haganah and the Irgun; the British occupiers’ anti-Semitism; and the moral challenges inherent to fighting for a righteous cause. I like City of Secrets much better than a novel I reviewed on a similar subject, I Lived in Modern Times, or, for that matter, O’Nan’s West of Sunset, about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years. That was a nice novel; City of Secrets is terrific.

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

To Life: Fever at Dawn

23 Monday May 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1945, book review, historical fiction, Holocaust, humor, Hungary, Jews, literary fiction, love conquers all, love story, Péter Gárdos, survival, Sweden, twentieth century, World War II

Review: Fever at Dawn, by Péter Gárdos
Translated from the Hungarian by Elizabeth Szász
Houghton Mifflin, 2016. 232 pp. $24

Imagine a Hungarian Holocaust survivor in 1945, receiving medical care in Sweden under Red Cross auspices. He weighs practically nothing, and he has metal false teeth, the real ones having been knocked out by thugs. Miklós’s doctor tells him he has tuberculosis, which will kill him in six months. But Miklós did not endure deportation, imprisonment, and torture only to succumb to an ancient plague, and he refuses to believe the diagnosis. So when he comes across a list of 117 Hungarian Jewish women also recuperating in Sweden, he proceeds to write each one, hoping to find a mate.

"Selection" of Hungarian Jews for either work or the gas chambers, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), May or June 1944 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

“Selection” of Hungarian Jews for either work or the gas chambers, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), May or June 1944 (Courtesy Yad Vashem, via Wikimedia Commons)

The results, by turns poignant and comical, carry this remarkable premise to a satisfying conclusion. But in saying so, I’m giving nothing away, for Gárdos has written this slim novel about his parents, drawing heavily on the bundles of letters his mother unearthed more than a half-century later and gave to him.

However, if Fever at Dawn ends predictably–the jacket flap leaves little doubt–how the narrative gets there is anything but ordained. Miklós, either a warm-hearted con artist or a vivid dreamer (take your pick), promises Lili Reich that everything will work out just fine, both between them and in life. This is a pretty astounding message for someone you’ve met only in brief letters, especially someone who was nearly left for dead at Bergen-Belsen. But Miklós actually believes it; and Lili, at first with reservations, gradually comes to believe it too. How he works that alchemy is marvelous to behold, and at times a little bewildering, because he can’t resist a soapbox. An ardent Socialist, whereas Lili is bourgeoise, Miklós lectures her on the proper way to view the world. It’s not always clear whether he takes himself seriously, but it’s his confidence that touches her, gives her hope.

But we all know the path to true love never did run smooth, and this courtship faces large barriers. For one thing, the two live in distant places, and the rules strictly forbid them to visit. They scheme, wheedle, plot, and attempt to manipulate their caregivers, pretending that they’re cousins–the oldest dodge in the book, which has no chance of persuading anyone.

Meanwhile, another of the 117 women shows up at Miklós’s rehabilitation center. How she manages is never explained, but she calls him her soul mate and expects him to work out every difficulty her presence causes so that they can be together forever. How Miklós gets around that uncomfortable situation, I won’t say. But I have to quote you the author’s description of what Lili and a girlfriend see when the two lovers meet for the first time, at a train station:

Miklós spotted the reception committee in the distance and smiled. His metal teeth glimmered in the weak light of the platform lamps.

The girls glanced at each other in alarm, then looked guiltily back toward the platform where Miklós was advancing through the thick veil of snow. He had to rest for a moment while he coughed. The left lens frame of his glasses was stuffed with scrunched-up newspaper–that day’s Aftonbladet–an operation he had performed in desperation half an hour earlier, leaving a crack free so that he could at least see a little. . . . . his borrowed winter coat, two sizes too big for him, floated around his ankles.

There are very few flashbacks, because neither Lili nor Miklós care to tell the other how they survived the war, or what they went through. But the author wants you to know, so there are a couple harrowing pages that put their romantic struggles into perspective. After sufferings like theirs, and what they’ve gone through to be able even to contemplate love, problems of time, distance, or unsympathetic, priggish administrators mean absolutely nothing. When you’re determined to love, you will.

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

Costume Drama: Design for Dying

16 Monday May 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1937, backbiting, costume, Edith Head, fashion, fraud, historical fiction, Hollywood, mystery, Renee Patrick, role playing, scandalmongering, studio politics, twentieth century

Review: Design for Dying, by Renee Patrick
Forge, 2016. 317 pp. $25

A young woman lies shot dead in an alley. You’ve heard that one before. But this time, it’s Hollywood, 1937, and the victim, “who’d rather live high for a few weeks than low for a lifetime,” was wearing a gown and jewelry filched from the Paramount Pictures wardrobe.

Sunseet Boulevard, Hollywood, 1937 (Courtesy losangelespast.com via  oac.cdlib.org)

Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, 1937 (Courtesy losangelespast.com via oac.cdlib.org)

In case you’re not a walking encyclopedia of the silver screen, let me inform you that the wardrobe mistress at Paramount back then was little-known Edith Head, later to become the most famous name in film costume. But now, she’s on the verge of being fired, and if the studio were looking for evidence against her, the scandal attached to this murder could be Exhibit A.

However, Miss Head isn’t alone. Lillian Frost, a star-struck New Yorker who came West for a screen test and has settled for a job as a department store clerk, was the dead woman’s roommate for awhile. Not that she liked Ruby Carroll much–many people didn’t–but Lillian found her fascinating, and still does. Moreover, she’s missing a brooch, given her by her late mother, and suspects that Ruby stole it. So when the police pull Lillian in for questioning, causing a stir at the women’s millinery counter, she does her best to persuade Detective Morrow to let her see the jewelry her former roommate died wearing. The brooch isn’t there, but she recognizes the dress from The Return of Sophie Lang, a movie she’s seen. That leads to Paramount Pictures, and–you guessed it–Lillian convinces the good detective to let her come along for the ride.

Right away, Edith Head impresses her as a professional woman who knows exactly who she is and what she was meant for:

She wore a shirtwaist dress the color of fresh buttermilk, a pattern of pale green leaves scattered across the fabric. Her petite frame should have been overwhelmed by the print but something about her bearing balanced it perfectly. . . . Her dark hair was cut into a bob, sharp bangs in a ruler-straight line above eyes that moved past lively to ferocious. . . . As her gaze swept over me I had the sense of my measure being taken, both ruthlessly and accurately. I straightened my spine, and could have sworn the woman nodded in approval.

It’s a wonderful partnership, and Lillian revels in it, not least for the free fashion advice. But I do have two objections to this clever novel, and I’ll get them over with now. There’s no way on earth, not even the movies, that Lillian would have ready access to the apartment she once shared with Ruby after the murder. The police would have gone through the place, sealed it, and, if necessary, posted a guard. All the evidence would have been swept up, and there would have been nothing more for Lillian to do. Likewise, the police wouldn’t have tolerated her presence (never mind her interference) while investigating the case.

Nevertheless, if you can overlook these flaws, and the occasional melodrama, you’re in for a treat. To begin with, Renee Patrick (a pseudonym for a husband-and-wife team) has Hollywood down pat–the preening, the cut-throat competition thinly veiled behind toothy smiles and air kisses, the jockeying for position, the narcissistic obsession with who might be watching and whether they’ll applaud. Is a friend really a friend, or someone looking for an advantage? That’s the question Lillian must constantly ask herself. It’s part of the mystery, which, outside of the implausible procedure, is very well done, sometimes in parody of the Hollywood genre.

The capsule descriptions can be very funny: “His slicked-back hair and thin mustache aimed for sophistication but only emphasized he had the flat, pie-plate eyes of a carnival huckster.” The dialogue offers plenty of thrust and riposte, with a chuckle on many a page. The Hollywood cameo appearances include Preston Sturges, Bob Hope, and, most memorably, Barbara Stanwyck.

But Edith Head outshines them all, perceptive to nuance and conscious of detail, just as a designer would be. Besides, she makes a terrific mentor for Lillian, who’s plainly too smart to remain a store clerk forever. And even if you don’t know anything about fashion, it’s fun to watch Miss Head at work.

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

Love and Guilt: Modern Girls

12 Thursday May 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1930s, anti-Semitism, feminism, historical fiction, Jennifer S. Brown, Jews, literary fiction, Lower East Side, schmaltz, shtetl, social snobbery, Socialism, Yiddish

Review: Modern Girls, by Jennifer S. Brown
Penguin, 2016. 363 p. $15

There’s an old joke about how a wedding differs in the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jewish sects, which turns on who’s pregnant–the bride, the bride’s mother, or the rabbi. In the Orthodox case, it’s the bride and her mother.

Lower East Side tenements as they appeared in 2004 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Lower East Side tenements as they appeared in 2004 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

In Brown’s terrific debut novel, however, which depicts Orthodox life on New York’s Lower East Side in 1935, it’s no joke. Both Rose Krasinsky and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Dottie, are pregnant, and neither planned it nor wish it. Rose has four surviving children, having lost one to polio and others in miscarriages, Dottie being her eldest. Rose has spent her life caring for them and her husband, Ben–worn herself out, in fact, to the point that she hoped she’d changed her last diaper. More importantly, she wants, above all, to have the time to devote herself to causes she believes in, such as helping European Jews escape Hitler’s menace. Her brother’s one of them.

Meanwhile, Dottie dreams of escaping the Lower East Side and the shtetl mentality to which Rose was born. She has a good job at an uptown insurance firm and has just been promoted to head bookkeeper. She has a fiancé, Abe, a solid, stolid type. Trouble is, Dottie’s baby isn’t his–and he’s in no hurry to get married, even resists her attempts at seduction, on religious grounds. Sooner or later, though, he has to find out, and so does her mother.

From this intriguing premise, Brown derives a morality tale, a mother-daughter story, a romance that’s satisfyingly hard-edged, a cultural exploration for a young woman divided between two worlds, and a feminist argument that makes its point without a soapbox. It’s unusual to find a first novel with such breadth, especially one that doesn’t compromise reality to ease the pain.

I know something of the world Brown describes, because my paternal grandparents, like Rose, worked in a so-called needle trade (though their profession was making hats, not lace trimmings). The Krasinskys are Socialists, as my grandfather was; I remember seeing Karl Marx in Yiddish on his bookshelf, though I was too young to know what that meant. So the inflections, idioms, and ways of thought feel familiar, and Brown sets her scene well in Dottie’s narration:

The smells of home–the ever-present reek of liver, of schmaltz, of carp boiling on the stove–caused an uproar in my stomach, immediately deflating my mood, reminding me of my misfortunes. Always the smells permeated, overwhelming even the sweet scent of baking challah and roasting tzimmes. Ma never escaped them, but I went to great extremes before leaving the apartment to douse myself in the cheap toilet water I bought at Ohrbach’s so as not to bring the stink of the East Side into my Midtown office.

(Translations: Schmaltz, when not referring to intensely Romantic music or melodrama, is rendered chicken fat, the secret to tzimmes, carrots stewed with fruit. There are less arterially threatening ways of cooking this dish, but Rose wouldn’t have known them, and even if she did, she wouldn’t have changed her recipe. The phrase, Why are you making such a tzimmes?, meaning, “such a big deal,” derives from the length of time it takes to turn the carrots practically molten.)

The novel vividly captures the fear of arousing scandal (and how neighbors tune their ears to it), the casual anti-Semitism of Dottie’s coworkers, the ways in which men assume their superiority over women, how only their ideas or desires count. Despite these riches, however, I hear false notes. If Abe keeps Dottie at arm’s length for religious reasons, why is he willing to go to the theater on Friday night after the Shabbat candles have been lit? More importantly, though the author draws Rose as a full portrait, I think she’s too modern and flexible about certain matters. If you read Modern Girls–and I recommend that you do–you’ll know what I mean, even if you disagree with me. And in a rare foray into schmaltz, Brown’s depictions of a wealthy, assimilated Jewish couple seem over the top, straw villains unworthy of this novel.

But still, Modern Girls is a fine accomplishment.

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

Cuba Libre: Night Work

09 Monday May 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1959, Cuba, David C. Taylor, FBI, Fidel Castro, Fulgencia Batista, Havana, historical fiction, J. Edgar Hoover, mystery, New York, social snobbery, thriller, twentieth century, Upper East Side

Review: Night Work, by David C. Taylor
Forge, 2016. 318 pp. $26

Michael Cassidy is a New York City detective who does things his way, which really pisses off a lot of people–like the Mob, the FBI, revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, Upper East Side bluebloods, and, oh, yes, his Department superiors. But what the hell, right? He’s very good at solving murders, and in 1959, that means there’s plenty of work to do. More important, it’s rumored he “has juice” or a “rabbi,” which is to say, friends in high places, not least his mobster godfather. (No, not that kind of godfather. A real one.)

Constantino Arias's photo, titled, "The Ugly American," of a tourist in Batista's Havana, 1950s (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Constantino Arias’s photo, titled, “The Ugly American,” of a tourist in Batista’s Havana, 1950s (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Nevertheless, Michael’s wiseass sense of humor pushes the wrong buttons. For instance, when the deputy chief of police demands to know whether the detective harbors “lefty” sympathies, as in, who he voted for in 1956, Michael replies, “Mickey Mantle. He had a good season. Batted three-oh-four, had thirty-nine home runs. I figured it was time for him to move up.” Naturally, that witticism doesn’t sit well.

But what’s bad (or shall we say, “inadvisable”?) for Michael is great fun for the reader. The reason Deputy Chief Clarkson wants to know his politics is because Fidel Castro, having just chased Fulgencia Batista out of Cuba, is paying an ambassadorial visit to New York. As it happens, Michael has been to Havana on police business, where, by the way, he sprang his former lover, Dylan McCue, from prison the day before her scheduled execution. Since many disaffected Cubans and their unsavory American allies (like Meyer Lansky, the mobster) would be happy to assassinate Castro, security will be tight. But will it be tight enough? And is there a Cuban connection to a murder Michael’s investigating on the Upper East Side?

Night Work is the sequel to Night Life and offers many of the same pleasures, though on a broader stage. Taylor writes about power as corrupting, and the Cuban revolution offers plenty of grist. You see it in the graft and brutalities of the Batista regime, which runs the country like a plantation, and in the revolutionaries who execute hundreds in the name of democracy, believing in slogans rather than decency. Compare these two descriptions, first, before the changing of the guard:

Havana was an occupied city, occupied by American tourists dressed in colors never found in nature. The cafés and bars were filled with afternoon drinkers having loud fun. It was an expanded version of the party on the flight over. Here none of the normal rules applied, and when you went home, anything that might smudge your conscience was forgotten, wiped clean by the ninety-mile flight across the water.

And after:

‘I was there,’ the man said and showed him his bandaged forearm proudly. He wore a madras shirt, khaki pants, and sandals, and he had a Thompson submachine gun barrel down on a strap over his shoulder. He wore the fuzzy beginnings of a beard, the new fashion in Havana. . . . .He laughed and offered Cassidy a cigar and insisted he drink from the bottle of rum he pulled from his back pocket, and when the next group of trucks entered the square, he righted his gun and fired a burst into the air.

But New York is still the novel’s core. The author depicts both the seedy corners where bagmen do their dirty work, hoping the big man will reward them, and the fifteenth-story apartments on the Upper East Side with river views, where bigoted, self-important snobs assume that messy problems are for lesser folk. I also enjoy how Taylor portrays Mephistopheles himself, J. Edgar Hoover, making a return cameo from Night Life. The New York idiom too, is always a treat, as with, “There’s a place over on Lex makes great coffee,” or “what I tell all of them come ask about my customers.” That’s writing with an observant ear.

At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll lodge the same complaints against this novel as I did its ancestor. Michael’s a male pheromone factory, and no female seems immune. He doesn’t even have to try, though in this book, one beauty actually ditches him for Paul Newman, if that says anything. Michael does have advanced chemistry going with Dylan, a KGB agent, and I believe that relationship, though I’m less sure about the way she keeps showing up at unexpected moments. It serves the story, which is extremely well plotted, the murder mystery in particular, but, as with some of the derring-do, I have my doubts.

That said, Night Work is enormously entertaining. Even better, the characters all believe in something, which gives depth to what, in other hands, might be merely a colorful, suspenseful novel.

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

Selfless and Selfish: Rush Oh!

02 Monday May 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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aggression, Australia, George Davidson, historical fiction, humor, killer whales, literary fiction, New South Wales, orcas, Shirley Barrett, whaling

Review: Rush Oh!, by Shirley Barrett
Little, Brown, 2016. 353 pp. $25

Where I live, in Seattle, whales are both a cultural icon and a marvel. Only the other week, a gray whale wandered into the locks between Lakes Union and Washington. As you may imagine, that created a stir and a delicate rescue operation, as cetaceans aren’t known for their ability to make U-turns in narrow lanes. I also fondly recall family vacations with the kids in Canada’s Gulf Islands, between the coast of Washington and Vancouver Island, where we often saw pods of orcas swim past, a marine ballet of such beauty that I felt honored, small, and insignificant.

Twofold Bay, New South Wales, was an important whaling center (Courtesy Wikemedia Commons; public domain).

Twofold Bay, New South Wales, was an important whaling center (Courtesy Wikemedia Commons; public domain).

So I picked up Rush Oh!, a novel about whaling in Australia during the early twentieth century, with a stone in my heart. Was I supposed to root for the impoverished whaling families who went hungry if they sold no whale oil or whalebone, or the magnificent creatures of the deep? And, once I began reading, what was I supposed to make of the orcas that harried the larger whales into harpoon range in return for a literal cut of the profits? Were they traitors or friends?

However, I’m happy to report that Rush Oh! is a wonderful book, a delicate authorial operation that surprises and enchants with no heavy lifting. Barrett glosses over nothing, neither the brutality of killing and capturing a whale, nor the characters of the men who do this work at Twofold Bay, nor the hardscrabble life of Eden, New South Wales. But this isn’t a novel about whaling as much as it is about love, or the lengths a person can and should go to get what he or she wants. Just as it takes great effort to track and capture a whale, so it does to find love or realize a dream.

At nineteen, Mary Davidson has particular trouble realizing her own–or even allowing herself to have them. In the six years since her mother died, she’s been maid-of-all-work at her father’s whaling station and surrogate mother to her younger brothers and sisters. She cooks for the family and the whaling crews, keeps house, teaches her siblings their letters, and makes sure her father, a respected man of whom she’s in awe, has what he needs. Mary wants more from life but also assumes that servitude is her lot and that she has no choice, either as a woman or as George “Fearless” Davidson’s eldest child. She might have had an easier time had she social graces, a fair face, or the courage to speak up. Those belong to the next sister in line, Louisa; their rivalry frames the story.

Mary hungers for warmth, whether from her father, siblings, or a man, and gets precious little. She notices that the whaling men stop swearing and mind their manners when Louisa’s around, entranced by her looks and “the will-o’-the-wisp way she floated about, avoiding anything that might look like work. The various flaws of her character seemed to pass undetected.”

One pleasure of reading Rush Oh! is Mary’s wry, naive voice, a pitch-perfect narration. You see what she sees and laugh, but you also see what she misses, which is a lot. For instance, Louisa is indeed a piece of work, selfish and willful. But her real advantage over Mary is that she knows what she wants and sets out to get it. Nowhere is the comparison more evident than in Mary’s attraction for John Beck, a newcomer to the whaling crew who may (or may not) have been a Methodist minister. In fact, there are several things he may or may not have done. But Mary falls for him, and the reader senses that hers is a heart about to be broken.

I love witty writing, and there’s plenty here. Consider this passage about Mr. and Mrs. Maudry, the family’s name for a pair of aggressive plovers that

. . . when they were not preoccupied with matters nesting . . . contented themselves with stalking broodingly about the garden and glowering at us. Mr. Maudry in particular possessed a malevolent air similar to that of a Land and Tax officer or Customs agent, an effect enhanced by the plovers’ plumage, in which nature appeared to be imitating the black-collared suit coats of the kind favored by my late paternal grandfather. By all accounts entirely capable of flight, the Maudrys for the most part elected not to, preferring to spend their days instead lurking ominously amongst the jonquils.

About those orcas, known as Killers. They have names, behaviors particular to each individual, a sense of humor, and loyalty to the whalers, who consider it a crime to kill one–especially the Aboriginal hunters, who believe each orca holds an ancestor’s spirit. These creatures actually existed; one, known as Tom, lived about sixty years, and when he died in 1930, the newspapers noted the fact.

All of which underlines how Rush Oh! plumbs the space between truth and fiction, and what you think you know about each.

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

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