Monthly Archives: July 2019

The Future’s a Riddle: The Almanack

29 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Almanack, by Martine Bailey
Severn, 2019. 328 pp. $29

In midsummer 1752, Londoner Tabitha Hart accepts a rendezvous at an inn with a well-to-do gentleman who promises to be an easy mark, only to waken and realize she’s the one fleeced. The loss of her money, jewels, and clothes proves more than a usual setback in the sex-and-petty-theft trade, for Tabitha was planning to bring her mother funds she desperately needs, for herself and the care of Tabitha’s out-of-wedlock daughter, Bess. Worse, when the destitute, half-dressed Tabitha reaches her mother’s cottage in the village of Netherslea, to her shock, her mother’s recent letters pleading for help prove all too prophetic. Mrs. Hart has drowned in the river, a death her daughter refuses to credit, especially given the constable’s explanation, that the old lady’s mind had grown infirm, and she didn’t know where she was going half the time.

Consequently, much as Tabitha longs to return to London, she must restore her mother’s reputation — there are whispers of suicide — and see justice done. Her only clue is her mother’s almanack, in which appear warnings about a certain D, said to be untrustworthy and dangerous. However, Tabitha has few illusions about remaining in her native village, where her reputation is mud, and the sanctimonious, vindictive Parson Dilks would like nothing better than to drive her away. He applies pressure to take the cottage away, because it was granted to her mother as the village “searcher,” the one who laid out dead bodies, inspected them for cause of death, and wrote the results in parish records. Through the intercession of more kindly souls, Tabitha is allowed to inherit her mother’s position, and therefore the cottage, but only temporarily, and Dilks finds other ways to persecute her.

A book of incantations, 1825, from the library of John Harries (d. 1839), a Welsh astrologer and medical practitioner (courtesy National Library of Wales, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Complicating the picture is Nat Starling, a swaggering lush who scratches out a living writing scurrilous stories about true crime and debauchery. Naturally, he falls for Tabitha’s beauty and intelligence right away, whereas he’s just the sort of man who has always been poison to her, which is why she feels drawn to him as well. But she won’t give him what he wants unless and until he helps her solve the mystery about her mother, which he seems to wish to do anyway, having been a friend of hers. But, as with everyone else in Netherslea, Tabitha can’t be sure of Nat, and his dissolute habits raise further doubts.

The Almanack offers a clever mystery, with twists and turns (and “no — and furthermore”) aplenty. Bailey’s a fine storyteller, but she’s done more than build a clockwork plot that keeps striking an odd hour, serving to heighten the tension. Rather, she’s re-created the lore of village life, with its superstitions, back-biting, and feast of gossip. She’s also paid due tribute to feminism, as Tabitha bitterly resents the double standard that calls her a whore but allows men license to do what they wish, further granting them credibility as witnesses that she can never hope to earn.

This intricate homespun tapestry begins with active description, as with Tabitha’s first glimpse of Netherslea on her return:

The riverside path was deserted that morning; from the golden motes in the air, she guessed most folk must be hay-making. Crossing a well-remembered meadow, she drank at an icy brook and breakfasted on bilberries fresh from the earth; the taste of them, tartly sweet, was fresher than any food she had eaten in years. Thereafter her way grew easy and she passed the succeeding miles serenely. She had forgotten the lushness of the Cheshire sward in midsummer; the murmur of insects on the wing, the wildflowers that bedizened her path. Idly she picked meadowsweet, wild rose and ragged robin, twining them into a chain and then winding it in a circlet through her hair.

Bailey takes her carefully delineated ambience one step further. Having researched the eighteenth-century passion for almanacks, which were recycled predictions published yearly and simply plugged into different dates, she makes excellent use of them here. Not only does the infamous D deliver on the ghoulish prognostications in the local almanack, Bailey introduces each of her short chapters with riddles in verse, which contemporary almanacks contained, and which were devoured avidly. The fifty riddles Bailey has chosen — most anonymous, but a few credited to Jonathan Swift, among other notables — predict some aspect of the episode to come. Since the mystery itself is a riddle, and solved through one, everything connects. And that’s part of the delight in The Almanack, which, despite an occasional cliché of character, makes a satisfying tale.

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

What a Mystery Is Man: The Phoenix of Florence

22 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Phoenix of Florence, by Philip Kazan
Allison Camp; Busby, 2019. 349 pp. 15£

Onorio Celavini, one of sixteenth-century Florence’s two police inspectors (to use a broad term), has a typical case on his hands, or so it seems. Near a bridge, a man lies dead, the apparent victim of a gang attack, for he’s taken two of his assailants with him. Known as a seducer of other men’s wives, he’s unmourned in many circles, but as a wealthy, powerful aristocrat, his death matters to officialdom — more so when a well-born woman dies soon afterward, the crimes apparently connected.

Celavini has heard this all before and is sick of it; whatever a man has done, a woman winds up paying for it. But that’s life, in Florence or elsewhere, and orders are orders — solve this case, and quickly. So he bends his considerable skills to the investigation, aided by an enviable coolness in the face of danger, product of his years as a mercenary, and his knowledge of Tuscany and its politics, lessons that any successful soldier imbibes in the field.

Giovanni Bellini’s portrait of a condittiero, or mercenary captain, late fifteenth century (courtesy Samuel H. Kress Collection at the National Gallery, Washington DC, via Wikimedia Commons)

However, Celavini gets a surprise when he hears a familiar name associated with the crime, one he knew in his youth but had thought extinct. That brings these murders close to home. But though the investigator’s personal involvement is an old device, it’s different here. Unlike most mysteries, the real puzzle is Celavini himself, and The Phoenix of Florence tells a tale more of revenge than of who done it, more Count of Monte Cristo than Sherlock Holmes.

Don’t let that stop you, and don’t be surprised when the criminal investigation leaves off, and a long section of Celavini’s past takes over — for more than half the book. Kazan is less interested in who killed whom than in why men and women are the way they are, the greatest mystery there is. And I strongly suggest that if you let yourself follow his lead, you will be richly rewarded. Human nature, venal or honest, evil or benign, comes into full view, but the crux of the novel, I think, has to do with strength, weakness, and who perceives them, that perception often having deeper consequences than it should. What Celavini does with this provides both a satisfying story and a fitting ending.

It’s a brave author who departs for two hundred pages from the main narrative, and my regular readers may recall that I faulted Daniel Mason in The Winter Soldier for a much shorter digression. But much as I admire that novel and its author, he had a different purpose. Celavini’s past is the main story. I’ll say that it’s rather violent, so be warned, but I dare give nothing else away — The Phoenix of Florence tests this reviewer’s mettle — so I hope you trust me by now.

One way Kazan grips you, digression or not, is the prose. So many historical novels have been set in Florence (or Venice) that they’re practically a trope by now. But try this:

It was stiflingly hot, and the miasma of the dyeworks and the river mud had finally managed to creep into the house. The stench curled itself around me, ripe with rot and sharp with minerals, as clinging and insistent as the memories that wandered through the empty rooms, whispering in my ears. My nightshirt felt like a lead sheet and itched. When I sat down, the wood of the chair seemed to suck my skin. I went out into the courtyard, but the air was thicker there, and a rat was fidgeting around in the dry fronds of the date palm. At last I lay down on the flagstones in the kitchen and floated in a twilight where the cold stone brought relief but was painful as well; however, I couldn’t have one without the other.

I wish I could say more, but I shouldn’t. Read The Phoenix of Florence and be amazed.

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

Rusalka: The Huntress

15 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Huntress, by Kate Quinn
Morrow, 2019. 531 pp. $27

In spring 1946, memories of the war are just beginning to fade — for some. Seventeen-year-old Jordan McBride, who lives with her widowed father in Boston, meets his new fiancée, an Austrian widow. Jordan welcomes her future stepmother and half-sister Ruth and takes them into her heart, luxuriating in the warmth and support she receives in return. Even better, Jordan’s stepmother encourages her to dream of higher education, something Dad doesn’t think a girl needs.

Four years later, in 1950, former British war correspondent Ian Graham; his assistant and translator, Tony Rodomovsky, an American; and Nina Markova, a former pilot with the Red Air Force, join forces in Vienna to track down Nazi war criminals. The Nuremberg Trials have focused on the big fish, but thousands of minnows have swum to safety, whether in various corners of Europe or the New World. They may be former assassins, concentration-camp guards, or petty functionaries who oiled the machinery of murder and appropriation, and Ian and Tony want them all, though they know that’s impossible.

Rare color photo of defendants at Nuremberg, taken by Raymond D’Addario, November 1945 (courtesy U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Nina, however, wants one in particular, a woman nicknamed die Jägerin (The Huntress), with whom she has a score to settle. So does Ian; and in one of the strange but clever twists in this thriller, Nina and Ian are married, though they’ve met only once, five years before for a couple days, and haven’t seen each other since.

Confused? Read The Huntress, and you won’t be. Quinn’s a fine storyteller, and she does an excellent job of stitching together many disparate pieces to make a coherent, exciting whole. The pages turn quickly, nothing happens too easily (except for a happy coincidence or two toward the end), and the stakes are plenty high enough. The reader knows long before the main characters who die Jägerin is, and where, but Quinn strings the inevitable confrontation out beautifully.

Of all the essential elements, I like the plot of The Huntress best. I do salute Quinn for calling attention to the problems of tracking down war criminals after Nuremberg, a forgotten cause. And I also like her attempt to explore the means one is permitted to use to see justice done. Ian rejects violence; Tony wouldn’t mind slapping around a witness or three; and Nina always carries a knife.

She’s the most interesting, fullest character by far. She’s done her best to amputate her heart, yet she comes across in part because she’s the only one with a developed past. Born by the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia, she styles herself a rusalka, a water witch, the type who drags down the unsuspecting victim. That lake figures heavily in her psyche:

The lake was frozen in a sheet of dark green glass, so clear you could see the bottom far below. When the surface ice warmed during the day, crevasses would open, crackling and booming as if the lake’s rusalki were fighting a war in the depths. Close to shore, hummocks of turquoise-colored ice heaved up over each other in blocks taller than Nina, shoved onto the bank by the winter wind.… Nina stood in her shabby winter coat, hands thrust into her pockets, wondering if she would still be here to see the lake freeze next year. She was sixteen years old; all her sisters had left home before they reached that age, mostly with swelling bellies.

Nina’s half-savage, knows it, and likes scaring her friends. But scaring her enemies feels even better, for in a life lived without sweetness, revenge is the only substitute.

The other characters don’t grab me particularly. Jordan, though she represents feminism in wanting a photojournalism career, lacks angles or corners and seems too all-American. Tony’s too good to be true, a composition of charm, chutzpah, and linguistic wizardry. (The narrative rather dubiously depends on the relative ease with which certain characters pick up, say, fluent German or Russian in a matter of months.) Ian feels like a compendium of elements rather than a complete person, and though his heart’s in the right place, I don’t entirely believe him.

But the story’s the thing, here, and aside from the occasional detail that makes me raise an eyebrow (having mostly to do with photography or firearms), Quinn has researched her ground thoroughly. I note a few present-day idioms that someone should have flagged, and too many bizarre verbs replace said, often followed by unnecessary explanations of what the character means by what she says. But The Huntress is a top-notch thriller with an unusual premise, and I think it’s worth your time.

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

From Auschwitz to Australia: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

08 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, by Robert Hillman
Putnam, 2018. 293 pp. $26

Dutiful, reliable, bewildered by life, unsure what happiness is or whether he’s ever experienced it, that’s Tom Hope — until he meets Hannah Babel. Hometown, Australia, has never seen anything like her, and even in 1968, the changes sweeping the West seem to have skipped this rural, agrarian corner of Down Under. Hannah, an effervescent Hungarian Holocaust survivor (a phrase probably seldom used, but it fits) plans to open a bookshop, of all things, and she hires Tom, a sheep rancher and orchardist, to do welding and carpentry to prepare for the opening. She’s utterly mercurial, older than he by fifteen years, speaks inflected English he can’t always fathom, and when she lets her canary, David, fly freely, the bird settles on Tom’s shoulder, further discomfiting him.

Hannah settles on him too, in a passionate rush that made me think, for a moment, that The Bookshop of the Brokenhearted derives from a male fantasy. But no; though their instant mutual attraction burns intensely, plenty of obstacles stand between them, least of which is that Tom has never read a book. A few years before, Tom married Trudy, a psychologically unstable woman who has left him, twice, and scarred him so badly that happiness is “a fugitive,” to “be roused to confidence, encouraged,” but, if grasped too strongly, might “slip back into the shadows, forever.” (Trudy’s legacy continues in other ways, but I don’t want to reveal too much.) Hannah has had two husbands, both dead, but she suffered her worst loss at Auschwitz, which stays with her, always. Metaphorically, that loss connects her to Trudy, something that neither Tom nor Hannah expected.

Poddy lambs, or orphans, drinking milk at a sheep station (ranch) in Australia (courtesy Figaro at English Wikipedia)

In lesser hands, a premise like this could easily turn sticky with treacle, melodrama, clichéd predictability, or a combination of these. Books, bookshops, and libraries are a hot thing in fiction these days, soon to be a trope, perhaps. Nevertheless, nothing happens here without second thoughts, reversals, mixed feelings, and a sense of dread, collectively the best tonic for treacle. Hillman never loses sight of his characters’ age, maturity, or makeup, and his narrative takes no adolescent flights of fancy, relying on simple prose, grounded in the everyday, again staying in character. Consider this passage early on, just after Trudy leaves, and Tom, in his workshop, wonders whether she’ll write:

With the soldering, it was the work of a good two hours. An old, demented ram he treated as a friend butted him repeatedly as he sanded and primed — not hard, just affectionately. And Beau [his dog] in turn chewed on the old ram’s leg. Tom asked himself aloud: ‘What do you expect her [Trudy] to say to you, you nong? “Hello, it’s a nice day?” For God’s sake.’ He was a practical person who never thought of fate and things that were meant to be. He could take apart an engine, stand surrounded by its thousand parts, find what was causing the problem, put the engine back together. He might daydream, but he knew that the dreams were foolish.

How can you resist a scene like that, which shows another side to a man not given to reflection?

Besides the treacle, it would be easy for a writer to adopt Hannah as a Jew of convenience, visible to a knowledgeable reader as unfamiliar with her own faith, which she’s also conveniently let slide. That’s a favorite device, as I’ve noted before in other posts. But Hillman knows his ground, rendering Hannah’s flashbacks with authority and depicting her Jewishness as well as the casual anti-Semitism of Tom’s neighbors. But their reaction is an aside; Tom has never heard of Auschwitz and has the barest notions of the Holocaust, about which Hannah refuses to tell him. So it’s the hidden past that lies between them, not what the neighbors say, about which Tom wouldn’t care anyway.

Names matter in this novel, at times too obviously. Tom Hope? Check. Does Babel refer to the tower of, given Hannah’s multilingual, sometimes chaotic persona; or Isaac, the great Russian writer murdered by Stalin? No question where Pastor Bligh comes from, a vicious, self-righteous disciplinarian who lives up to his namesake, except that he’s incompetent at his job. I have no sympathy for fundamentalist Christian cultist lunatic sadists, and I suppose that’s fair. Yet I want this man to have a three-dimensional rendering, and he doesn’t get one.

Even so, that’s the major glitch in The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, a warm, satisfying, decidedly unsticky novel, which I highly recommend.

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

Burning Reason: The Name of the Rose

01 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
Houghton Mifflin, 2014 [1980, 1983] 579 pp. $16

As Brother William of Baskerville, an English Franciscan monk, nears the Italian abbey where he’s to attend a conclave, he correctly deduces from tracks in the snow and other minute details that the party of brethren approaching him on the road are seeking a horse — whose name he also guesses. Naturally, this astonishes both the search party and William’s companion, his scribe, a German novice named Adso. It also pleases the abbot, who’s delighted to have so keen an observer on hand, because a young monk has died under suspicious circumstances, and the mystery must be solved before the conclave takes place in a few days’ time.

Or, to be precise, the abbot seems pleased, but the readily apparent struggle between truth and expediency dividing the abbey’s occupants, heightened by the anticipated high-level meeting, clouds his motives. The year is 1327, and the church is fighting itself, with one pope in Rome, and the other in Avignon. The expected French envoys — and, menacingly, their accompanying armed force — include a charismatic, unscrupulous inquisitor whom William knows and fears; he was once an inquisitor himself but gave it up because he felt the entire process of hunting heretics was irrational and unjust. Since then, he has openly avowed the empirical philosophy of Roger Bacon and William Occam (he of the famous razor), beliefs that unsettle many other monks and, in their eyes, skate dangerously close to heresy.

Pope John XXII, a protégé of the French crown, lived a princely life in Avignon and opposed the Franciscan doctrine of poverty (image by an unknown nineteenth-century painter; courtesy Palais des Papes, Avignon, via Wikimedia Commons)

Moreover, the abbot has forbidden William to investigate the library stacks, labyrinthine rooms that no one save the librarian himself may enter. This restriction cripples William’s efforts, particularly after more monks die, and he supposes that a hidden text holds the key. So, with Adso in tow, he invades the abbey’s sanctum sanctorum, with ever-startling results.

Adso makes a superb narrator and foil, a Watson scared of where knowledge will lead, to William’s Holmes, who thinks knowledge itself can be neither good nor evil. A weighty theme, and The Name of the Rose tips the scales at almost 600 pages, but Eco does a brilliant job focusing on two issues that, at first glance, seem too ridiculous to kill for, whether for personal motives, to serve the church, or for reasons of state. First, did Christ ever laugh? And second, did he and his apostles choose poverty, the belief on which the Franciscan order rests?

But the narrative, if at length, shows why these questions matter in 1327 and today. If Christ did not laugh, the official reasoning goes, satire, jokes, and humor are either vile, a threat to faith, or both. However, William argues that if a devout person must have only a certain sober, humorless mind, then the inquisitors rule, as in fact they do, and the crucial precept of accepting faith through free will ceases to exist. As William warns Adso, “The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”

The question of poverty has a more immediate political implication. The Franciscan order has splintered, prompting rebellions against church power, to which the church has responded by burning heretics, charging the use of magic, and accusing their opponents of free love and appalling butchery. But as William tells Adso, the rebels don’t care about church doctrines, especially; they resent the extreme wealth of the church and the regimes it supports, both of which contribute to keep the poor as they are.

Amid all this, monks continue to die, and William must divert his efforts from solving the mystery to play politician during the conclave, standing up for his beliefs while avoiding condemnation. As you may have figured out by now (how did I give it away?), The Name of the Rose is a discursive book, but no less mesmerizing for that:

The creature behind us was apparently a monk, though his torn and dirty habit made him look like a vagabond. Unlike many of my brothers, I have never in my whole life been visited by the Devil; but I believe that if he were to appear to me one day, he would have the very features of our interlocutor. His head was hairless, not shaved in penance but as the result of the past action of some viscid eczema; the brow was so low that if he had had hair on his head it would have mingled with his eyebrows (which were thick and shaggy); the eyes were round, with tiny mobile pupils, and whether the gaze was innocent or malign I could not tell: perhaps it was both, in different moods, in flashes.

The Name of the Rose does what the best historical fiction should: illuminate the past by its own lights and therefore reveal the present. As a mystery, it is excellent; to that, add profundity and power.

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