Monthly Archives: June 2022

The Price of Revenge: The Blood Covenant

27 Monday Jun 2022

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Review: The Blood Covenant, by Chris Nickson
Severn, 2021. 212 pp. $29

Leeds, 1823. Simon Westow, a thief-taker, meaning someone who retrieves stolen goods for a fee, hears from a doctor friend about two deaths that disturb him deeply. A pair of young boys has been murdered, apparently by a factory overseer. Leeds, starting to gain a reputation for its textile mills, witnesses a great deal of industrial child abuse. That’s because children, hired to scoot below the machinery to perform certain tasks, rebel against the long hours of exhausting labor, and the foremen don’t spare the rod.

J. M. W. Turner’s 1816 watercolor, Leeds (courtesy Yale Center for British Art, via Wikimedia Commons)

Since Simon himself just managed to escape that life and has two young boys of his own, the news of the deaths causes him sleepless nights. On one such, he goes for a walk and happens on a young man, throat cut and hand severed, being pulled from the river.

Despite Simon’s curiosity and principles, none of this need have anything to do with him. Leeds mill owners are beyond the law, for this is early nineteenth-century England, and money buys many things, including constables and magistrates. And Simon, though he’s investigated murders before, prefers to stick to thief-taking, a less dangerous, better-paying proposition — not to mention he’s recovering, slowly, from an illness for which a doctor friend has no name.

But when circumstances connect the boys’ deaths and that of the man pulled from the river — none too convincingly, I might add — Simon begins to probe all these crimes, hoping to find a measure of justice in a society where the word has little meaning. Before he’s done, many bodies will fall, mostly in hand-to-hand combat, of which The Blood Covenant provides many scenes. Leeds is one rough town, and if you wish to live out your portion of natural days, you’d best keep a well-sharpened knife in your pocket and know how to use it.

Nickson, the author of the excellent mystery series featuring the Leeds policeman Tom Harper, set toward the end of the century, has once again shown the gritty side of a cruel city. How people managed to live in that place back then makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. That the disenfranchised receive no protection from the law goes without saying. Further, Nickson reminds readers about the evils of the factory system, which remain with us, if in different forms, if in sweatshops overseas.

Nevertheless, though the first three installments in this series may deserve the name mystery — I haven’t read them — this fourth volume doesn’t. Few puzzles emerge demanding solution, or, to put it another way, every question has an answer easily obtainable by putting a coin in the proper palm. Rather, the narrative offers a progression of violent confrontations, as the evildoers will stop at nothing to have their way. That requires our hero to remain vigilant, constantly looking over his shoulder, and he must dig deeply into his resolve and skill. Consequently, given that framework and the public stakes of justice for those who never receive any, The Blood Covenant feels more like a thriller.

Mystery or thriller, the chief pleasure here, aside from the historical atmosphere, is the plot, which moves rapidly. The characters, though, seem flat to me, either all good or all bad, with one crucial exception — Jane, Simon’s friend and associate, whose street smarts, surveillance skills, and knife handling put his in the shade. A nice reversal, there, and Jane’s inner conflicts offer complexity too. Raped by her father at a young age, then pushed onto the street, she has a particular view of life that stands out in even this novel of death and heartbreak.

As for the storytelling, I prefer the Harper novels, though again, I admit that The Blood Covenant may be an outlier within its series. The narrative tells far more often than it shows, sometimes to state or repeat the obvious. The descriptions have little or no emotional resonance, precise though they may be in detail, as with this one, about a mill owner’s home:

It was a room to impress guests, decorated in the finest taste that money could purchase: a wallpaper of pale, comforting blue and white stripes, an oil painting of a naval battle hanging over the mantel, long-clock ticking soft and serene in the corner. The chairs were upholstered in deep blue velvet. A plush Turkey rug covered the polished floorboards. It was all understated, a dignified announcement that Arden had arrived, that he was respectably rich these days. It was exactly what people expected from a house in Park Square.

Nickson plainly has a cause, and a worthy one, about wealth perverting the law. The pages do turn easily, as you wonder how Simon will finesse or force his way past the barriers that keep getting placed in his path. But if you read The Blood Covenant, you may find the theme and story the most rewarding aspects of the novel.

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

Convent Under Siege: The Maiden of All Our Desires

20 Monday Jun 2022

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Review: The Maiden of All Our Desires, by Peter Manseau
Arcade, 2022. 327 pp. $27

Somewhere in midfourteenth-century England, the plague ravages the populace, as it does elsewhere in Europe. A remote convent, deliberately secluded to discourage visitors, secular or ecclesiastic, is under siege—from the threat of infection, yes, but two other forces as well. One is a snowstorm the like of which nobody can recall seeing, and which feels and looks apocalyptic. The third threat, perhaps the most serious, arrives from above in a different sense: The bishop, having heard rumors of heresy at the convent, is coming to investigate.

Nobody dares talk about the danger, and the abbess, Mother John (many of the nuns have taken masculine names, according to which religious figures inspire them), seems to deny any peril at all. But around her lurks the fear that wherever a bishop looks for heresy, he’ll find it. Moreover, he may not have far to look, for the convent, especially Mother John and those she influences most strongly, puts much faith in the sayings of the previous abbess, Ursula. For instance: “Birds see all but say nothing we can understand, which make them a perfect symbol of the divine.”

You see the problem here: Since when is a woman’s philosophy meaningful, particularly if it replaces standard (read: created by men) dogma? Mother John would object to the accusation of replacement, arguing that her beliefs coexist with those of the church. However, her outlook, though scrupulously devout, seems based on common sense — rather refreshing, if you ask me, and perhaps most modern readers would agree.

But nobody’s asking us, or anyone else, for the spirit of inquiry is precisely the problem. A good fourteenth-century Christian is supposed to obey, not think, let alone question. And the manuscripts of Ursula’s that Mother John refuses to get rid of could send her and many others to the stake.

Consequently, The Maiden of All Our Desires deals with where faith comes from, what it means, and how the earthly world gets in the way. The Department of Earthly Delights has its ambassador in Father Francis, the priest who hears the women’s confessions and performs other necessary sacraments, but who might have preferred to follow wood carving as a career, and who has known forbidden pleasures. That means he has secrets to keep and sins for which to atone.

A working water mill in Lyme Regis, UK. An ingenious mill wheel figures in the novel (courtesy Zephyris, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The novel purports to unfold over the course of one day, divided into the various prayer services–matins, lauds, prime, and so forth. Umberto Eco followed a similar framework in The Name of the Rose, though at greater length and with greater coherence. In Manseau’s novel, it’s not always immediately clear when events happen, the day of the snowstorm or in the past, but bet on the latter, and you’ll be right most often.

Back story rules, which can be difficult to sort out, but stay with it. There’s much here to enjoy. A different literary conceit, from the publisher (not the author), invokes Matrix and Hamnet, among other comparisons, which proves, once again, that the publicist’s favorite game provides the surest way to minimize in glibness each book’s essence or meaning. What else would you expect from a soundbite?

That said, having loved both those other books, I see a resemblance, though not because Matrix involves an abbess. It’s the tactile prose.

She reached out timidly to touch the crucifix, to be certain of what she saw. With two cracked, scratching fingers, her hands shaking like a bride’s, she moved down the leg from knee to ankle. The wood was cold and smooth, carved perfectly. She traced her fingers along the rounded line that joined the legs, and felt the angles that made its curve: numberless angles, like a tiny and perfect mountain range; peaks formed meticulously by a skilled hand and the finest of edges, undetectable by sight, but so apparent to the touch. She felt too the grain of the wood and the remnants of rings, the signature of the tree this once had been.

A typical passage, this. Throughout the novel, Manseau’s descriptions reveal inner life, setting, and conflict. It’s reason enough to read the book, but consider also the story, which, despite the occasionally confusing time frames, keeps you riveted and offers a satisfying ending. As for characters, Mother John and Ursula come through, but I would have liked more differentiation among the nuns, other than their petty rivalries.

Further, it’s curious how Father Francis commands an outsize presence in this community of women, though perhaps that results from the necessities of plot and the importance to it of earthly desire. Nevertheless, Manseau, curator of religion at the Smithsonian Institution, knows his ground thoroughly and has written a thought-provoking, engaging, and entertaining novel.

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

“Destroy This Mad Brute”

16 Thursday Jun 2022

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Building on my post two weeks ago about the Seattle parade and propaganda efforts, here’s more historical background for my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

Many recruiting posters in Britain and the United States appealed to men by addressing the masculine imperative to protect women. But the one shown here pulls out all the stops.

H. R. Hopps, 1917 (courtesy Library of Congress)

“Destroy This Mad Brute” posits a savage gorilla wearing a spiked helmet that says, “Militarism,” wielding a club labeled “Kultur” (frequently translated as “civilization”), and abducting a fair-haired woman. She, for once, isn’t wearing white, and you can’t see her face, a concealment perhaps intended to spare her; or conversely underline her humiliation; or leave the viewer free to imagine her as a loved one. Further, the invader advances menacingly, having already torched American shores to cinders. The single word “Enlist” sends the message.

For starters, I find it sad and utterly misguided how humans can cast other primates as savage, when we’re the ones to machine-gun and bomb each other; but gorillas, essentially peaceable, shy creatures, have long suffered a bad rap (witness King Kong). The German Army had abandoned the admittedly ludicrous (and impractical) spiked helmet by 1916, but for some reason, it became an emblem of brutality, and American propagandists loved it.

As for “militarism,” responsible for the invasion and destruction of neutral Belgium, that’s the lone scrap of truth. But, as I noted in a previous post, legal and moral arguments lack visceral appeal. Ridiculous as it sounds today, the suggestion that the German Army raped its way across Europe and would somehow cross the Atlantic to repeat the crime found its adherents.

The story of this poster didn’t end there. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Hitler’s chief propagandist, Josef Goebbels, rolled out this same illustration, with different text, to inoculate the German public against foreign charges of atrocities.

More to come.

Starting Place: The School of Mirrors

13 Monday Jun 2022

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Review: The School of Mirrors, by Eva Stachniak
Morrow, 2022. 399 pp. $17

The year, 1755. Thirteen-year-old Véronique Roux lives in a squalid Paris apartment with her mother, who scratches out a living mending old clothes, and three younger brothers. One day, Maman tells Véronique she’s to go into service for a wealthy nobleman, and just like that, the girl’s shipped off to a splendid home a brief carriage ride from Versailles, where Louis XV holds court. Naturally, her mother receives certain financial considerations.

Told that her patron is a Polish nobleman attached to the court, Véronique is groomed for her upcoming service to him. She’s given plenty to eat; her skin and hair cleansed of lice and treated for various ailments common to poor children; she’s taught penmanship, posture, and comportment; to improve her singing and recitation; and, most important, instruction, religious and secular, stressing modesty, restraint, and obedience. In other words, qualities foreign to the French monarchy.

The emotions had to be controlled at all times. Anything vulgar had to be strictly avoided. Eating fast and too much, running, jumping, stomping our feet, shouting, cursing, showing either sadness or joy. ‘News of a death or a proposal of marriage… must be met with equal composure. Always smile, whether you are happy or not. Make your eyes sparkle, no matter what you are thinking of.’

Meanwhile, the narrative also recounts life within the palace at Versailles. In particular, we learn how the king, jaded and bored with his caged existence, longs for pleasures to lift his heart (and another part of his anatomy, which seems to rule his moods). He can’t stand dealing with matters of state, which include a war that’s going badly, so he spends as little time on these as possible. How droll.

Rather, everyone close to him, most especially his former mistress and closest advisor, Madame de Pompadour, do their best to divert him with gossip, prop up his flagging ego, and provide tender flesh to interest that other, significant part of him. Practically from the get-go, the reader understands what Véronique doesn’t: what her “service” will entail, and who her patron really is. She’s a bit dense for a Parisian girl, especially a beauty who’s endured advances from strange men and whose mother has all the tenderness of a brick, therefore the embodiment of hard lessons.

Charles André Van Loo’s portrait of Mme de Pompadour, née Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, ca. 1755 (courtesy Petit Trianon, Palace of Versailles, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Suffice to say that the “Polish nobleman” takes a shine to Véronique, and her subsequent pregnancy gets her expelled from paradise. Her child, Marie-Louise, is taken from her, while Véronique’s packed off to marry some grain merchant.

That I haven’t yet recounted the main premise of the novel tells you the major weakness of The School of Mirrors: The story really picks up steam seventeen years and 175 pages after it begins. Marie-Louise’s life in Paris, apprenticeship to a midwife, and ringside seat at the revolution and its excesses form the core of the book, and I like this part. So do we really need to know, in meticulous detail, how despicable the Bourbon monarchy was under the previous, fifteenth Louis?

Stachniak seems to want to reveal the precise depth of sexual abuse, misogyny, and moral corruption, and what a gruesome, ugly tale it is. I don’t think that justifies its presence, and I suspect that if you began reading at page 175, you’d understand almost everything you need to know to appreciate the novel. Well-chosen back story could have filled in the rest.

The first half of the book does offer a few noteworthy characters. I like the portrayals of the king, his chief procurer, and Madame de Pompadour. The descriptions give a vivid picture of court life — the author knows her ground — though I’d have liked them better had they struck an emotional chord. Some feel merely decorative, static.

But there’s no comparing with the second half of the book, where conflict spins more rapidly, and the revolutionaries turn out to be just as corrupt as the monarchy they toppled, if in their own way. Marie-Louise has more to her than her mother, and the narrative feels more intimate, therefore more compelling.

I wonder whether Stachniak has two novels here; she’s got two stories, certainly. Her desire to connect the two and derive surprise lacks the impact she may have hoped for, but that strategy’s apparently a trend, these days: try to shock the reader, at any cost to narrative flow or plausibility. At least the author doesn’t withhold information the way some do — she’s too generous for that — but I’ve never understood the fascination with connecting multiple disparate narratives. Seldom does it work out as intended in artistic terms, so it must sell books.

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

The Great American (Historical) Novel: The Scarlet Letter

06 Monday Jun 2022

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Review: The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Penguin, 2003. 228 pp. $8

Maybe you know the story, even if you’ve never read the novel. Hester Prynne, a woman of seventeenth-century Boston, must be punished for having borne a child out of wedlock. In this most Puritan community, she’s lucky to escape with her life; instead, she spends several months in prison, after which she must forever wear a scarlet letter A, announcing that she’s an adulteress.

The simplest of premises, you’d think, yet there’s nothing simple about this quintessential American moral tale, written in 1850. Hawthorne, descended from a judge at the Salem witch trials, an ancestry that shamed him and influenced his work and life, cuts surgically into the withered, envious soul of Puritanism and holds the stinking mess up to the light. (For those interested in a fictional account of the author’s life and struggle with his unwanted legacy, see Erika Robuck’s House of Hawthorne.)

It’s not just that the reader is meant to understand and sympathize with Hester, who’s actually a bit of a stubborn drip, at times. It’s that Hawthorne wants you to see the society that condemns her, a group of caviling hypocrites who may or may not lust for her but certainly do for the wealth and power they possess. Nobody escapes, Hawthorne says; there’s evil in all of us, and desires aplenty.

Mary Hallock Foote’s illustration of Hester and Pearl, from an 1878 edition of The Scarlet Letter (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

H.L. Mencken, writing more than a half-century after Hawthorne, quipped that Puritanism was “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” The Scarlet Letter bears witness, as even children’s play involves games of persecuting Quakers or attending church. Some leading elders assume that Hester’s daughter, Pearl, unable to answer a single question from the catechism at age three, may therefore be Satan’s handmaid. She is ungovernable, it’s true, and has a mean streak that pains her long-suffering mother. But she’s also a happy child, and nobody knows what to make of this.

Crucial too is how Hester wears her A, skillfully embroidered, perhaps pushing the bounds of everyday Puritan taste (though not of formal wear, curiously enough, especially among the rich and powerful). Consequently, the adulteress hides nothing, though she largely keeps to herself, because her every public appearance challenges her judges as to their righteousness and pretended sobriety of custom.

But, in Hawthorne’s world, sin must be spoken of, or else it eats away at everyone. The Scarlet Letter pays heed to the spiritual and emotional as though they were the same. To feel whole, the sinner must confess, so as to breathe freely; conversely, so as not to overstep the bounds of humility, the hearer must listen and withhold judgment. Desires are human, not particular to individuals. To Hawthorne’s seventeenth-century Boston, this idea was revolutionary — and in some ways, it still is, not in what American society says, but what it does.

Hawthorne’s style can take getting used to, even for readers accustomed to nineteenth-century literature. Not only does he tell, tell, tell, explaining damn near everything, he imbues the smallest moments with hard-working metaphorical swoop:

The mother’s impassioned state had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life; and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the untempered light, of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare of Hester’s spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl. She could recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated by the morning radiance of a young child’s disposition, but, later in the day of earthly existence, might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind.

That style deserves consideration in its context, however. Hawthorne was countering the point of view that all wisdom and truth comes from God; he argues that humans can find truth anywhere if they look hard enough, particularly within themselves. The Scarlet Letter, published nine years before The Origin of Species, feels like kin to Darwin, though it has nothing to do with biology: Both works deal with the power of observation and its overriding importance. Hawthorne wants you to see his abstractions, as though the spiritual world inhabits the physical. Often, he succeeds.

Strange, but I had avoided reading The Scarlet Letter, and I’m not the type to shun the classics. As a high school sophomore, I transferred out of an English class, no mean trick, led by a teacher with whom I knew I’d quarrel, and who’d just begun discussing this novel. The teacher whose class I transferred into turned out to be a mentor, so I got the better deal–and swapped Hawthorne for Dostoyevsky, Huxley, Orwell, and Zamiatin besides. But I still didn’t let Hawthorne off the hook—there’s a Puritan in me too—and more than fifty years passed before I found out what Hester’s story has to offer.

Don’t make the mistake I made. At least take a look at The Scarlet Letter.

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

The young women in white

02 Thursday Jun 2022

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Building on last week’s post about the Seattle parade, here’s more historical background for my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

In the parade, the white horses, white flower petals, and young women in white dresses all played to symbolism of feminine purity. Why?

Not for the first time in history, but in a context particular to the First World War, belligerents sought to persuade their able-bodied male citizens that they must fight to save womanhood. The idea pervaded recruitment propaganda in Britain and the United States, likely because neither country had been invaded, and so had no self-evident reason to fight.

When Congress declared war in April 1917, American recruiters had to rouse a nation comfortably at peace. To do so, they evoked wartime events that had not budged neutrality one inch when they happened but were now recast to prompt every man to do his duty or risk being called less than a man. A key reference point was the German invasion of Belgium in 1914.

While the invasion was happening, the press failed to convey its true horror and went for the sensational. Though the invaders executed thousands of Belgian civilians, committing arson and pillage, alleged rapes and mutilations of nuns, women, and young girls were what made headlines. Even as American newspapers exploited these lurid stories for the shock value, most reserved judgment, doubting that the disciplined German Army could have permitted such outrages.

Then, in May 1915, a German submarine sank the liner Lusitania, killing almost 1200 people, including 128 Americans. In what amounted to a publicist’s perfect storm, a week later, the British government published an official account of the Belgian invasion atrocities, mentioning the firing squads, burning, and looting but once again playing up accusations of rapes and mutilation, which rested on hearsay evidence from unsworn witnesses.

That lapse went largely unnoticed, and the report electrified American opinion. If the Germans could sink the Lusitania, mightn’t they have committed sexual atrocities in Belgium? Isolationists could argue that was still none of America’s business, but the perceived outrages would not go away. For instance, the New York Tribune, a pro-Allied paper, printed a drawing of a Belgian widow comforting a weeping Miss Columbia. The caption suggests attitudes common to the time: “At Least They Only Drown Your Women.”

Come 1917, then, American recruiters had no trouble tapping into beliefs about German sexual atrocities and, tacitly or explicitly, using them to goad to action any man who called himself a man. This poster, promoted by the Hollywood film industry, employs blatant sexual imagery, with a half-clad Miss Columbia–in white, of course.

Schneck, 1917, Acme Litho. Co. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

But the propagandists were just getting started.