Monthly Archives: April 2021

Betrayer and Betrayed: The Revolution of Marina M.

26 Monday Apr 2021

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Review: The Revolution of Marina M., by Janet Fitch
Little, Brown, 2017. 800 pp. $30

Marina Dmitrievna Makarova, as old as the century in 1916, can’t wait to break free of her constrained, privileged existence in Petrograd — or thinks that’s what she wants. Change is in the air, and desperation grips Russia, an empire bleeding its life away in a world war practically nobody supports, except her parents. Refusing to accept their rules or blandishments, she has a love affair or two, one with a fellow poet; marches on behalf of oppressed workers; and glories when the revolution topples the tsar. You can guess that this family will soon fracture even more.

But though Marina has been true to herself, she pays a terrible price. What the revolutionaries promise bears no relation to what happens in reality, and this passionate young woman, whose motto seems to be, “Act first, think afterward,” finds out the hard way. To name just two problems, it’s difficult to tell which threat is worse, famine or the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police.

As a bourgeoise, Marina’s already an enemy of the state and can’t be too careful, constantly having to prove herself despite who she is, a direct opposite to the advantages she enjoyed in her youth. Taking care doesn’t entirely square with her impulsive nature, but she’s also a quick study and finds she has more inner resources and survival skills than she knew.

The novel opens in California, 1932, so there’s no question she survives the revolution. As my regular readers know, I detest prologues, but there’s a practical reason for this one. The current volume is only the first of a series; the author has apparently decided not to leave the reader hanging at the end, and I think she’s right. Further, the journey’s more about how and why than where, and Marina covers a lot of ground, emotionally and physically.

Stinton Jones’s photograph of a demonstration on Nevsky Prospekt, Petrograd, March 1917 (courtesy https://archive.org/details/ russiainrevolut00jone via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Throughout, however, Fitch realizes the Russian atmosphere, be it Petrograd or rural peasantdom, with bold, lush strokes and complete authority. With unflagging attention to detail, she renders the idealism and mercilessness that suffuses the air, and gives you back alleys, great houses, and, in this instance, a Cheka prison:

The smell of wet walls and mold, and a dirty animal odor, increased as we descended. A slaughterhouse stench. He [the guard] walked me down the dim hall. Muffled voices came from behind thick doors. A rising shriek snaked from the base of my spine and coiled around my heart, squeezing my throat in its knot. We passed yellow walls the color of old teeth. Black sticky floors sucked at our shoes. Bare bulbs buzzed overhead. The rest of the country was plunged in darkness, but the Cheka would have its electricity.

Like the Russian novels Marina M. evokes, this one has much more to it than a sweeping lens and epic events — it’s the characters who count the most. Marina takes center stage, but her lovers come through with brilliant clarity, as do her mother, younger brother, and a radical revolutionary friend. You understand what motivates these people, all of whom have inner lives for the reader to navigate. So much happens that it seems our heroine has lived a full lifetime by her nineteenth birthday, but that weight never feels like a burden, even at over eight hundred pages. That’s because Fitch keeps you in touch with the feelings of the moment.

Much of the novel revolves around Marina’s sexual awakening, mirroring her political cognizance, as she learns more about attraction and sex as power. Though she enjoys men as lovers, she seldom loses her perspective on who gets to make decisions, and who has to follow them; who gives the orders; and who does the work. This is particularly trenchant, because the revolution that was supposed to honor all work and eliminate the roles of master and servant clearly hasn’t touched relations between men and women. Once, when she witnesses a peasant wife completely efface herself before her husband, Marina observes privately that Marx may have believed that power belongs to those who control the means of production, but this mother, who has produced four children, is her husband’s chattel.

Marina M. is also about betrayal, involving parents, children, lovers, ideals, or merely the greed and envy of the comrade listening at the keyhole. Marina, both victim and perpetrator, wants what she wants and won’t be denied. If at times she seems excessively larger than life or has an insight perhaps more convenient than earned, these are minor blemishes on an otherwise exceptional, engrossing novel.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from a neighborhood free library. I’m grateful to whoever donated it.

Hard-Boiled, Yet Warm: Fortune Favors the Dead

19 Monday Apr 2021

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Review: Fortune Favors the Dead, by Stephen Spotswood
Doubleday, 2020. 321 pp. $27

Brooklyn, 1942. Willowjean Parker, a circus performer, has a temporary gig on her off nights guarding a building site, trying to earn some extra dough. That leads her to make two significant connections. First, she interrupts what might be an attempted murder, having deduced that a particular mug is trouble, and intervenes at the right moment. Second, the potential victim she rescues is Lillian Pentecost, the city’s most famous private detective, who offers Willowjean (known as Will) a job. Lillian suffers from MS, and she needs someone to perform legwork, preferably someone who’s agile, observant, and able to defend herself. Thus begins a fruitful partnership.

Three years later, a headline case involves the detectives. The prior year, Alistair Collins, whose steel company got fabulously rich on wartime government contracts, shot himself, which raised questions at the time. Now, the war has ended, and the board of directors resists calls to abandon the weapons business and return to peacetime manufactures. Those demands come from Abigail Collins, Alistair’s widow — and, as it happens, his former secretary. But she too dies, at a Halloween party where a medium conducts a séance, and practically everyone in the phone book is a suspect.

However, when the police get nowhere solving Abigail’s murder, the Collins family calls in Lillian and Will, hoping to make headway on the investigation without drawing attention. The insistence on secrecy might be only natural, given the Collins name and position of wealth and power, except that everybody seems to be lying. To add to the confusion, Will has a thing for Becca Collins, the late industrialist’s beautiful daughter, and the attraction seems mutual.

Throw in that Will, the proverbial child who grew up rough and ran away to join the circus, has a narrative style that will remind you, if the circumstances don’t, of the hard-boiled detective novels she devours. One quip reads, “She’d filled up with enough coffee to get Rip van Winkle doing the jitterbug”; or, about Becca, a “borderline wild child,” Will observes, “Though ‘wild’ by the standards of her tax bracket might constitute using the salad fork on the entrée.” Falling for a key witness is also an oldie, though the gender reversal provides a twist. You get the idea, though, that Spotswood’s aware of what he’s imitating, and his obvious love for the genre shows through. He also knows better than to take it too seriously.

Humphrey Bogart plays Raymond Chandler’s great hard-boiled detective, Philip Marlowe, with Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge, in their 1946 film The Big Sleep. (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain, as the National Motion Picture Council did not renew the copyright.)

The author weaves the mystery with a sure hand, and though you may guess at a fact or two, he hides the trail well while still leaving everything in plain sight. Or just about; I’ll get to that in a second.

The real divergence from convention centers on the characters: They’re vulnerable. Lillian holds back more, because she’s naturally reserved, but you get her around the edges, and she’s human. I wish she came across more fully, but here’s a woman who knows she’s dying, yet asks no favors and gives her services pro bono to people who couldn’t afford her, like those with abusive husbands or crooked employers. Lillian has a cause, helping other women, which in part led her to Will.

Will’s more out there emotionally, and though her bio sounds like a cliché, she herself isn’t. She has passions and principles, and if she’s more likely to show the latter than the former, you do see them, and she’s not in the least buttoned down like her boss. She too will respond to a woman in distress, as she once was herself, a worthy feminist twist on an old formula. Always, beneath the tough exterior lurks a frightened child:

But sitting in that cell, my anxieties bred fast, and like with the bedbugs, scratching only made it worse. I spent the second night alone. The only light was from a dim bulb far down the corridor. The bravado I’d managed to conjure up and wear like a shield drained away. I pictured the cell door opening and my father stepping in, his face red, leather belt wrapped tight around his fist.
Found you.

A few chapters from the end, when the detectives are close to solving the mystery, Spotswood plainly withholds conclusions they’ve reached or specifics about preparations they’re making. I wish he hadn’t, but I understand why he does so. He also pulls a punch in the great revelatory scene, in which the detectives spill all (another trope, that). On a minor note, the courtesy title Ms. appears throughout, oddly enough. There’s a hint that Will is narrating from the distant future, but that would not explain why characters in 1945 would even think to speak like that.

However, these are quibbles. Fortune Favors the Dead is a terrific mystery, and this first volume in an intended series promises entertaining adventures.

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

A Way of Seeing: The Electric Hotel

12 Monday Apr 2021

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Review: The Electric Hotel, by Dominic Smith
FSG, 2019. 352 pp. $18

In 1962, Claude Ballard lives in a once-fashionable Los Angeles residential hotel, among old film containers and equipment and memories of a difficult, yet stimulating, past. A long-forgotten (fictional) film director whose magnum opus was The Electric Hotel, shown only once, in 1910, Claude lives out his days taking neighborhood walks with camera in hand and keeping a benevolent eye on a neighbor, a former silent film star whose memory and understanding of her surroundings often desert her.

Into Claude’s quiet, measured existence wanders Martin Embry, an academic field historian writing his dissertation, who takes one look at the director’s apartment and wants to know if the celluloid in those canisters has been developed and preserved. Actually, he takes one whiff and realizes they haven’t, for the decomposing film gives off a strong odor, like vinegar, which Claude has never noticed. That shocks him and makes him more receptive when Martin tries to persuade him to loan him the films that can still be salvaged in the laboratory. Just as important, he coaxes the hermit to recount his life story; it’s as though Claude suddenly realizes that he’s been gathering dust and doesn’t have to.

And what a story, from a lonely youth in Alsace — Claude’s French, by birth — in which his mother died of smallpox when he was quite young. Claude nearly succumbs himself, and afterward, when his vision falters — “the edges of objects began to slowly quake and fringe” — the village doctor sends him to a specialist:

… Claude emerged with a wire frame prescription wrapped behind his ears and it was suddenly as if he’d swum to the surface of a very deep lake. The world rushed back in as the coppered edge of an October leaf, the crinoline hem of his teacher’s skirt, the yellow-white flange of a chanterelle mushroom on his father’s foraging table… He was a diver emerging from the murky, myopic depths into a bell jar of crystalline edges and forms.

That’s exactly the same impression Claude has when, years later in Paris, he watches the first moving pictures of his life. The Lumière brothers, pioneers known today mostly to ardent cinephiles, create minute-long films of everyday life — a bus traveling down the street, people in a crowd. From that moment, Claude knows his life mission. Not only does he want to learn about and make films, he wants to see and record life the way the Lumières do. A shy, withdrawn person who expects no one to notice him, for him, this is true adventure.

Marcellin Auzolle’s 1896 publicity poster for a Lumière brothers comic film, L’Arroseur arrosé (The Waterer Watered), showing the astonished, enthralled audience (courtesy moah.org/exhibits/archives/movies/movie _theatres_p.html; public domain in the United States)

The Electric Hotel requires a reader’s patience, for the narrative takes a while to get places, portraying Claude’s career, associates, and obsessive love for Sabine Montrose, a French actress who stars in his films. But every time I asked myself if I really wanted to continue reading, once I started, I got lost in the story. It’s not just the writing, which often leaps off the page. Nor is it the fascinating detail about making movies back in the old days–and Smith means old, before any of the silent-film stars commonly discussed today got their start (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Mary Pickford, to name a few).

The tale of how Claude and his friends film The Electric Hotel, which occupies the bulk of the novel, involves a Siberian tiger, a dirigible, an impossible leading lady, and a cameo appearance by a grasping, self-involved Thomas Edison. Equally important, the novel portrays a forgotten time and place. As always, people crave novelty, wish to be entertained, even to be shocked. But after they see Claude’s films, they may resent them afterward, because their attraction to the images tells them something about themselves they’d have preferred not to know.

So too with Claude, who tries to hide behind the camera, even into old age, to avoid facing his past. But the past never leaves — it’s all there, whether on celluloid or in meaning—and he’s a casualty.

Most of the characters come through fully, at least the important ones; other than Claude and Sabine, I particularly like Chip Spalding, the Australian stunt man who covers himself with grease and sets himself on fire. However, several lesser figures remain faceless, and I wish the narrative had paid more attention to them, rather than include certain sequences that contribute very little. I especially wonder about a long First World War segment in Belgium, which, though well told, seems utterly superfluous (and bears little resemblance to any historical facts I know, or even possibilities).

Nevertheless, The Electric Hotel may beguile you as a tale of a bygone era, evoking passionate excitement over a way of seeing that hadn’t existed before—and which we now take for granted.

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

Mission Improbable: Three Hours in Paris

05 Monday Apr 2021

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Review: Three Hours in Paris, by Cara Black
Soho, 2020. 360 pp. $17

One Sunday in late June 1940, Kate Rees parachutes from a British airplane into France and reaches Paris, a city she knows well from before the war, now barely weeks into the German Occupation. But this visit, she won’t be frequenting the cafés she recalls so fondly, or the booksellers by the Seine, places where her late husband courted her. Kate’s in Paris to shoot Hitler, because British Intelligence has decoded German wire traffic and learned he’ll be there.

A gripping premise, to be sure, and from first to last, Three Hours in Paris never lets up. I admire the storytelling, which lives inside a flashing sign that says, “no — and furthermore.” But I have to take issue with just about everything else, because if the breathless pace ever paused, the absurd circumstances defy belief.

This famous photograph, from June 23, 1940, records Hitler’s brief, only visit to Paris. Flanking him are (left) Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production, and Arno Breker, an artist. (Courtesy U.S. National Archives and Records Administration; public domain in the United States)

Kate’s American, a neutral citizen in June 1940, which makes her a peculiar choice for such a mission. Though she’s a crack shot, having grown up on a ranch in Oregon, that’s her sole qualification, aside from her American-accented French. What’s more, her handlers somehow gloss over the eventuality that she might be caught, and for some reason, she doesn’t press them. That’s typical of her training, rudimentary and brief, and of the vague, amateurish atmosphere of British Intelligence, rather like a classroom that’s slipped the teacher’s control. (To be fair, this isn’t the famed Special Operations Executive, but its predecessor, known as Section D.)

The German side of this equation seems almost as absurd. We have Gunter Hoffman, a Munich homicide detective somehow working for the Reichsicherheitsdienst, or security service, assigned to track down who fired at Hitler. In a very tired trope, Hoffman doesn’t particularly care for the Führer; with so many novels about disaffected Germans, it’s a wonder the war ever happened. But that’s less the problem here than the overhyped interservice rivalries. Those add a few “no — and furthermores” for the detective to grapple with, improbable as they are.

As for Paris, the city seems wide open for business, an unusual situation for a Sunday, as any Francophile traveler knows. Finally, Kate’s mission quickly morphs into much bigger game, which ups the stakes, always a plus, but at further expense to credulity.

However, to her credit, Black manages to finesse a few of these clunkers, countering expectations. That’s where Three Hours in Paris does best; nothing is certain, ever, and Kate never knows whom to trust, if anybody. If the author has chosen an unlikely protagonist on an improbable mission, she makes up for that in part by wedging her heroine into a tight space and tightens it further without respite. Human laxity does Kate a favor, every now and again, but every time she slips through a net, she’s earned her escape with ingenious, on-the-spot thinking, and you know her respite will be temporary.

That’s Black’s payoff from deciding to use an untrained agent; everything’s a surprise, nothing has been planned. But Kate’s up against a crack detective in Hoffman, tireless, equally adept at quick thinking. It’s a pleasure following his reasoning, wondering how he’ll box Kate in; you have to admire his skill. Black’s known for her Aimée Leduc mysteries, set in Paris, and the author has police procedure and the city down pat; I’m sure she realizes her Sunday portrayal stretches the truth. If the military and espionage operations appear fuzzy, Paris comes in crystal clear:

She took a side street and familiar scents assailed her: the tangy odor from a green metal pissoir, a whiff of a woman’s perfume, the acrid smoke of a hand-rolled cigarette. Rapid-fire Parisian argot spilled out of a shop, now bearing signs of future rationing regulations, and onto the sidewalk. The conversation was punctuated by the snort of an ice wagon horse, the clatter of the wagon’s wheels and the clip-clop of hooves on the cobbles, the flower seller’s shouts. The Paris she knew, if more subdued.

You have to like the two main characters, though neither comes through with much depth. Emotional transitions happen in an eyeblink, and more than a few sentences in these passages restate the obvious. But if you read Three Hours in Paris, you’re reading for a high-octane plot, and in that, the novel delivers.

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