Monthly Archives: December 2020

Heresies: The King at the Edge of the World

28 Monday Dec 2020

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Review: The King at the Edge of the World, by Arthur Phillips
Random House, 2020. 265 pp. $27

In 1591, Mahmoud Ezzedine lives a fulfilling life. As court physician to the Sultan Murad in Constantinople, Mahmoud is highly respected, and his general practice gives him a deserved reputation as a skilled, empathic healer. He has a comfortable house, a beautiful, loving wife, and a son whom he dotes on. Truly, Allah has blessed him.

But a diplomatic mission to London, of all places, is setting forth, and Mahmoud, who’d rather not go anywhere, is dragged along. He has little choice, really, for Murad the Great’s command is law. However, the official who gives the Caliph of Caliphs the idea to send the doctor with the diplomats lusts after Mahmoud’s wife. As a kind, honest person who prefers directness to invasion or suggestion, Mahmoud’s no match for that particular courtier, or any other, for that matter. And you just know, even if you haven’t read the jacket flap — don’t — that the good doctor will make an innocent mistake, for which he’ll pay dearly.

If you’re like me and get upset when you read about decent people suffering for their virtues while the evil triumph, The King at the Edge of the World will make you ache. For that reason, short as the novel is, and recounting as riveting a story as you could want, the threats to our hero kept me from plowing through. Do read the book, though — but not, repeat, the jacket flap, about as potent a spoiler as you’ll ever find.

Sultan Murad III (d. 1595) by an unknown Spanish artist (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain). As his first act upon accession to the throne, Murad had his five younger brothers strangled.

Phillips excels at re-creating historical attitudes, prejudices, and ways of reasoning. Mahmoud’s adventures in England also resemble a thriller’s in their ever-increasing intensity; combined, these elements make a strong, thought-provoking narrative. At its center, Phillips puts the England riven by conflict between Protestant and Catholic and imagines how a Muslim would view that. It will be recalled that Elizabethan politics and diplomacy revolved around who prayed where, and in what way, and how many people died, often in hideous fashion, for doing it wrong or attempting to make everyone else do it their way. Hard to imagine that all this idiocy happened during an age blessed with cultural triumph — and Mahmoud, the observant Muslim, remains unimpressed:

He was there, he reminded himself, to be a figure of strength and confidence in the face of endless strangeness, of threats to health and mental stamina. He must fortify the bodies of the embassy’s men (himself included) and fortify their minds against all that was wrong here: the half-naked women, the food, the fog, the filth, the intoxicating drink, the intellectual softness, the islanders’ several varieties of devoted and violent false faith.

The physician, if he weren’t a member of a diplomatic mission, would be called a heretic and a savage to his face (as some English folk manage to imply even as they think they’re being polite). But who’s the person who embodies religious virtue, and who are the real heretics? Who’s the savage, and who’s the civilized, cultured man? This is how Phillips casts the sceptered isle in its glory. To be sure, he also creates an English narrator who insists that Catholic plots against the realm do exist and, if not crushed, would cause widespread bloodshed. Since he’s utterly credible, the question then becomes how to square the civilization and the savagery; and of course, there is no real answer.

My only objections to this novel — have I mentioned the too-revealing jacket flap? — concern Mahmoud’s role as a political actor. How could such a guileless innocent occupy any court position, let alone that of a physician, with the power to kill as well as heal? After all, history records how Ottoman crown princes, on attaining the throne, might have their brothers strangled with a silken cord, as Murad did. Only the politically adept would survive such an atmosphere, or even be invited into it.

Similarly, as the narrative progresses, Mahmoud learns a thing or two about survival — not easily, mind you, and requiring excruciating mental gymnastics, which Phillips ably portrays. For that reason I don’t entirely accept the end, which the author fudges somewhat, unwelcome in itself.

Nevertheless, I invite you to read The King at the Edge of the World and be amazed at Mahmoud’s ingenuity — and his creator’s.

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

Orwell’s Vision: The Last Man in Europe

21 Monday Dec 2020

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Review: The Last Man in Europe, by Dennis Glover
Overlook, 2017. 240 pp. $27

By April 1947, Eric Blair, whom the world knows as George Orwell, conceives what he believes will be the book that will fix his reputation for all time. However, at age forty-three, he’s fighting the tuberculosis that keeps him bed-ridden, so writing becomes nigh impossible. But even if you didn’t know Orwell from Adam—and didn’t read the jacket flap—you’d still know what happens. He’ll finish Nineteen Eighty-Four, which will indeed cement his reputation, but the effort will kill him.

This framework, not quite a premise, sounds almost Greek in its tragic outline, yet The Last Man in Europe, though interesting, never rises anywhere close to that level. I can’t blame Glover; he’s writing a novel with an ending too famous to be a surprise, about an author whose thinking is as relevant now as then, if not more. “Big Brother” and “doublethink” have entered the language; saying, “What they’re doing is like 1984!” evokes a police state. As a novelist, then, how do you create tension in a foregone conclusion? Answer: The journey, which could involve several questions. How does Orwell manage, despite his illness? How do his ambition and political passion lead him to ignore his doctors’ advice? What life experiences have brought him to his dystopian vision?

Glover gets partway there. He excels at the essential, dwelling on the politics, as Orwell himself would have preferred. You understand how he thinks, how he’s always trying to observe, the political atmosphere that shapes him, and how he reacts to whatever he finds false or hypocritical. Glover’s prose, like Orwell’s, is absolutely lucid, sharp, and direct, as in this passage about a premonition, in July 1938, of coming war:

. . . it was like a physical presence in his life already, pressing down on his chest, with its bombing planes and air-raid sirens, its cratered streets and smashed windows, and its loudspeakers bellowing that our troops had taken a hundred thousand prisoners on some front that no one had ever heard of. And after that? Dictatorship, just like there would be in Spain, when the fascist noose was finally pulled tight. Yes, it was all going to go—all those things they were now taking for granted: the England of Dickens and Swift, the bum-kissers with their frivolous novels, strong tea and heavy scones, thrushes singing in the woods and dace swimming in their pools.

What an adventurer Orwell is, and not just as a writer intent on verbal and intellectual provocation. He descends into a coal mine, en route to writing The Road to Wigan Pier, his description of depression-era, working-class struggles, and feels self-conscious as a decidedly middle-class person. He enlists in the war against Franco and is nearly killed twice, once by his own side, events that inform Homage to Catalonia.

What Orwell conveyed about the Spanish Civil War in words, photographers like Gerda Taro did in pictures, as with this 1936 image of militiawomen in training. Unlike Orwell, however, Taro did not survive the war (courtesy https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/09/21/arts/20070922_TARO_SLIDESHOW_11.html, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the U.S.)

Along the way, Glover tells you how his protagonist has gathered the bits and pieces that wind up in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Buying black-market razor blades, submitting to excruciating medical treatments, staying in a farmhouse overrun by rats—all those scenes, and more, find expression in the masterpiece, literally or in essence. Though Glover handles many of these clues in subtle fashion, sometimes the treasure hunt feels like wink-wink, nudge-nudge, inside jokes. Even so, I still like the dinner with an aging, cantankerous H. G. Wells, or a school classroom where the adolescent Eric Blair has a back-and-forth with his teacher, Aldous Huxley, about what the most crushing type of dictatorship would look like. (From the earliest age, Orwell seems to come in contact with everybody in British literary circles.)

But I still want to know who Eric Blair is when he’s not thinking or writing politics, and Glover doesn’t show me. Since we know that Orwell can’t die in Spain, for instance, the plot, if there is one, consists of episodes that exist to provide political subject matter. Much as I admire Nineteen Eighty-Four and many of his other works, I want to see the man behind them, not just the political man. How does he really feel in his “open marriage” when his wife sleeps with someone else? It zips by in one sentence, as does guilt over his own love affairs. Glover gives us mostly surfaces, and maybe Orwell didn’t want anyone to probe him any deeper. But if so, why? And if you probed anyway, what would you find? That’s what’s missing, here.

The mask does slip toward the end, as Orwell races against his mortality, physical limitations, and his publisher’s prodding. I glimpse the yearning for fame and money that has largely eluded him (Animal Farm excepted), and the frustration that so little time remains, leaving no room for error or hesitation.

Some Orwell enthusiasts will be delighted with an (almost) purely political depiction and enjoy the revelation of sources for his magnum opus. But from this polished treatment of one of the most polished writers of the twentieth century, I come away unsatisfied.

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

What Will It Take?: The Last Thing You Surrender

14 Monday Dec 2020

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Review: The Last Thing You Surrender, by Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Bolden, 2019. 500 pp. $17

When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, George Simon, a nineteen-year-old marine badly injured from a fall in a wounded warship, survives only because a Black messman, Eric Gordy, makes a superhuman effort to save his life. Though they’ve probably seen each other daily, George doesn’t know Eric’s name or anything else about the “messboy.” Growing up in a well-to-do Mobile, Alabama, home, George recognizes only two Black faces, both household servants. All others are invisible to him. Moreover, in the hours before a rescue team saves the small group of survivors in the sinking warship, Eric slips, falls, hits his head, and drops into the oily water, drowning before anyone can reach him.

Wracked by survivor’s guilt and determined to honor Eric Gordy’s heroism, George tells everyone who will listen about his savior’s courage and strength. But no good deed goes unpunished, for when George recovers enough from his injuries to walk on crutches, he’s sent home to Mobile with a mission. He’s to ask Eric’s widow, Thelma, who also lives there, to travel around the country, telling their story to raise war spirit among “the colored.”

To his credit, George balks. (The narrative never quite explains how he gets away with disobeying a direct order.) More importantly, when he visits Thelma, he sees at once the depth and intelligence missing in his fiancée, Sylvia, a beautiful airhead who uses racial slurs as casually as “hello” or “goodbye.” George’s attraction for Thelma remains largely unconscious. But her moral authority prompts him to entertain an idea he’s never encountered, that his race prejudice makes him less than the man he wants to be. And when he learns that Thelma’s parents were lynched and burned alive, which explains the unveiled hostility George meets in her older brother, Luther, the young marine begins to see how little he knows of life.

Dutifully, he tries to explain his confusion to Sylvia, who laughs in his face. Her reaction makes him think of how Alice and Benjamin, the two Black servants, must feel in the Simon home:

How many times, in the nearly 30 years that Benjy had been part of their household, had he been passing in a hallway or lingering invisibly in a corner and heard one of them—Sylvia, Mother, Father, even George himself—say that word? Say it laughingly. Say it matter-of-factly. Say it with less thought than you’d give to waving at a fly.

A more potent, timely premise would be hard to find, and, for the most part, the various narratives retain power until the end. The reader follows George as he returns to combat, first on Guadalcanal; Thelma, as she goes to work in a Navy yard, spray-painting warships; and Luther, after a draft notice requires him to fight for a country he detests.

A tank from Company D, 761st Tank Battalion, in Coburg, Germany, late April 1945. The 761st, among the finest armored units in the U.S. Army, was almost entirely Black (courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

In this novel depicting wartime, I like the Stateside narratives the best. The racial conflicts at the shipyard and at Luther’s army camp call out on every page, Just what the hell is wrong with our country? Pitts takes no prisoners, nor should he, and though many plot points seem predictable, what he does with them lends a dash of the unexpected. In the main, the story works.

The battlefield sequences ring true, yet the military narratives surrounding them feel truncated, as though the author doesn’t want to linger. He’s got places to go and people to see. You can understand, considering that at five hundred pages, The Last Thing You Surrender is plenty long as it is. Nevertheless, about halfway through, the novel loses some immediacy. It’s as though the story must pick up pace, or . . . . Or what?

I suspect that the search for redemption is at fault here, and the book has to get going so that it can happen. You can tell which characters will see the light, though I’m not sure they all earn their epiphanies, which come about through witnessing or experiencing degradation so powerful it shakes them to their roots. Maybe Pitts is saying that’s what it takes to change; you have to see just how vicious people can be before you can give up hatred.

Not everyone here does, and the violent racists in this novel are duly unrepentant. But Pitts immerses those willing to open their eyes in events that are so well known they’re practically tropes, sort of like ticking boxes off a list of meaningful historical incidents that everyone has heard of.

That’s my major objection to The Last Thing You Surrender, how the narrative grunts and strains to give characters famous external circumstances by which they can reach internal change. Is that how it happens? And if it does, why rely on such events, when everyday observation, if written vividly, might work as well—and, because it’s unexpected, carry more tension?

That said, the novel asks that all-important question—what will it take before we treat each other respectfully, righteously?—and Pitts offers a thought-provoking answer. Read it.

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

Who Killed Marilyn Sheppard?: Do No Harm

07 Monday Dec 2020

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Review: Do No Harm, by Max Allan Collins
Forge, 2020. 297 pp. $28

This much is history: During the early morning hours of July 4, 1957, someone bludgeons Marilyn Sheppard to death in her suburban Cleveland bedroom after a possible attempted rape, which she seems to have violently resisted. Suspicion immediately falls on her doctor husband, who nevertheless claims he was asleep on a daybed one floor below. He insists he rushed to her aid when he heard her screams and suffered a physical assault from the killer that damaged a vertebra in his neck.

Actor David Janssen playing Dr. Richard Kimble in the final episode of The Fugitive, 1967, a much-acclaimed ABC television series loosely based on the Marilyn Sheppard murder case. My high school classmates often talked about the show (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States, as the image first appeared without a copyright tag)

The crime becomes notorious, largely because a Cleveland newspaper beats the drum for Dr. Sam Sheppard’s conviction even before his trial begins. Other irregularities mark the prosecution, not least the judge’s refusal to grant a change of venue; a lackadaisical approach to forensic evidence that suggests prejudice against the defendant; and testimony that borders on hearsay. Even so, Dr. Sam, as he’s known, behaved strangely right after the murder, and his two brothers, also physicians, tried to shield him in ways that arouse suspicion. Just before Christmas, a court convicts Dr. Sam and sentences him to prison.

Enter Nathan Heller, Chicago private investigator (and Collins’s creation, unlike many characters in this true-crime novel). Having visited the crime scene hours after the killing in the company of his friend Eliot Ness, Nate has glimpsed physical evidence as well as what the police and coroner do or fail to do. Not only that, he’s a hotshot with a national reputation. Consequently, in subsequent years, when the mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner (creator of Perry Mason) takes an interest in the case and hopes to discover whether a retrial is warranted, he calls on his friend Nate.

Naturally, the Ohio authorities take a dim view, so Nate must be slicker than Brylcreem if he’s to interview the key players. All fear exposure, in one way or another. But as our hero sifts through the conflicting stories, he faces setbacks, and the trail goes cold over the years. Even so, the narrative that results, the search for new evidence and the real killer—if it’s not Dr. Sam—won’t let you go.

This is where Collins excels. He knows everything there is to know about the case but uses only the most relevant details. The reader follows Nate as he probes one possible suspect, then another, yet the more he learns, the murkier things get. Just when you think he’s nailed down the truth, you find he hasn’t, and not until the very end do you discover the most likely solution.

Collins’s style has been compared to Raymond Chandler’s, and though I won’t go that far, Do No Harm offers its verbal pleasures. A Dictaphone machine “hugged the desk like a frightened time traveler”; “You could have sliced the smoke in here and sold it for bacon”; and “peeling brown paint, like the ugliest suntan in history” decorates one scene of operations. Consider the previous paragraph describing that locale:

To some, the Cleveland Flats, situated on the bottomland of the river’s floodplain, was an industrial wonder — shipyards, foundries, oil refineries, chemical plants, lumber yards, flour mills. To me, the Flats would always be a hellish collection of gin joints and warehouses, where sailors and workingmen wandered in a dank, dark world lit by flickering neon and open flames from gas runoff, the silence broken by honky-tonk music and the fingernails-on-blackboard screeches of factories across the river. Some of these dives dated back to the turn of the century, piles of brick held together by sweat, sawdust and swill.

I recommend reading Do No Harm, but I’m unlikely to try another Nathan Heller novel. When I said the PI had to be slick, that he is. He never makes a mistake, and setbacks don’t throw him. Powerbrokers tell him no or move to block him, but he doesn’t care. You know he’ll work around them if he can’t go through them. Cornered by three punks who’ve gotten the drop on him? Pity them. Attractive women, and there are many, all flirt with him, and he has a way of viewing women as sex objects first and anything else second. Maybe that’s the hard-boiled genre, and it was probably unremarkable in the 1950s, if not the later decade, as the story progresses. But it’s nevertheless distasteful, especially since Nate never has an inconvenient feeling, if any at all, so he seems like a robot wired for high-voltage sex drive.

Given all that, if you read Do No Harm, you know what you’re getting: a throwback, for better and worse, and a ripping good story.

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