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South African Tragedy: Who Killed Piet Barol?

17 Monday Apr 2017

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Review: Who Killed Piet Barol?, by Richard Mason
Knopf, 2016. 362 pp. $28

Despite the title, this remarkable novel is no whodunit, unless you take the death implied in the title as a more symbolic accusation, in which case we’re all guilty.

Now that I’ve confused you thoroughly, let me explain. Piet Barol, last seen in The History of a Pleasure Seeker making his way in Amsterdam through roguish charm, has broadened his horizons and his debts. Styling himself a French viscount, he’s living large in Cape Town with his American wife, Stacey, a former opera singer blessed with charm and diplomatic cunning more than equal to his own. But the Barols’ furniture business is failing, partly because Piet can’t bring himself to collect what he’s owed, but mostly because they spend money they don’t have to keep up appearances. Things look desperate, especially as the year is 1914, and Europe plunges into war, which puts Piet in a bind. Had he represented himself truthfully from the get-go as a Dutch national, he’d be in the clear, since the Netherlands remains neutral. But as a French aristocrat, surely he should be fighting for la patrie?

The South African Native National Congress delegation to the British Parliament in 1914 tried unsuccessfully to reverse colonial land policy (courtesy historywiz.com)

So it’s altogether convenient that he disappear for awhile, and when he hears that there’s a forest full of high-quality wood available for the taking, he sees how he can restart his furniture business with practically no overhead. However, to find the wood and remove it, he must hire two Xhosa men, Luvo and Ntsina; and therein hangs a tale.

First of all, this is no ordinary forest, but one dating from the time of Jesus, fecund in its density:

The grove was almost a single being, so bound were its member trees to one another, and yet each was wholly individual. They had grown together from saplings and forged a union without conflict, free from betrayal and viciousness. In their crowns were gardens of fertile soil, several inches deep, dropped over centuries by passing birds. In these gardens earthworms wriggled, grown distinct from those that churned the forest floor. Their branches began thirty feet above the ground, and this refuge from predators made them desirable residences for all sorts of creatures that relished distance from the great cats.

The forest represents a society of interdependence, in other words, a metaphor for that which white colonists have set about destroying among the Bantu peoples whose land they have stolen. More specifically, the noblest trees serve a religious purpose for the Xhosa, who believe their ancestors reside within them, whereas Piet doesn’t even know that the trunks are as old as Christianity.

But Mason, who managed to make Piet a sympathetic character as an Amsterdam imposter, does so here as well. Not only does Piet befriend Luvo and Ntsina in a true sense and grow to trust them, he lets himself see things from their perspective and corrects his behavior accordingly. He also entrusts his young son, Arthur, to them so that the boy can learn the ways of the forest, which Piet correctly judges will help him grow into a man. That said, Piet nevertheless sets out to take the Ancestor Trees, and though he fully intends to compensate Ntsina and Luvo for the loss, he’s a plunderer. And his failure to stand up to Stacey, especially where his African associates are concerned, makes him a weakling.

Then again, the degree to which he comes to love and understand life in the wild frees him from many prejudices. It also releases the artist in him, so that the furniture he carves adopts African themes and is absolutely gorgeous. Morever, Mason takes care to show the village politics among the Xhosa, many of whom, in their own way, are just as rapacious as the colonials.

But in the end, you know that all this will go wrong, that the scale of destruction the white men wreak will be far greater than that of the black, and that only one side will profit. That systematic destruction answers the question of the title, and that’s why I said we’re all guilty for condoning or participating in the crime. But how Mason arrives at this conclusion makes a fine tale, and that he renders the Xhosa in ways that ring true is no accident. For a year, he lived among them in a tent, learning their language and culture, and establishing a center for green farming. Who Killed Piet Barol? is a worthy result, a wide-ranging discussion of morals and racial tensions, and a pretty good yarn besides.

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

Bloody Pastures: The Black Snow

19 Monday Sep 2016

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Review: The Black Snow, by Paul Lynch
Little, Brown, 2014. 264 pp. $25

It’s 1945, and the Second World War is in its final, convulsive months, but in county Donegal, Irish country folk have their own violent conflicts to think about. The barn belonging to Barnabas Kane, an up-and-coming farmer, has burned, killing forty-three head of cattle and a handyman, Matthew Peoples. The fires have hardly cooled before the whisperings begin: Barnabas sent Matthew into the barn and was therefore responsible for his death. But no charges have been filed, and no one really knows what happened.

Glengesh Pass, county Donegal, northwest Ireland (Courtesy Jon Sullivan via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Glengesh Pass, county Donegal, northwest Ireland (Courtesy Jon Sullivan via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Nevertheless, Baba Peoples, the late man’s crazy widow, believes Barnabas killed her husband, and that the Kanes owe her compensation. She even goes so far as to point out that Eskra, Barnabas’s wife, has brought “foreign ways” to the village; Eskra keeps bees, for example. What else would you expect from a woman born in America? For that matter, villagers hostile to the Kanes–which, by now, is most of them–remind one another that Barnabas came from America too, forgetting that he was born in Donegal, emigrated, and returned with Eskra as his bride. It’s a brilliant stroke on Lynch’s part, showing how quickly superstition and prejudice prevent any reasonable assessment of the tragedy and turn it into an occult act perpetrated by evil, so-called outsiders.

Consequently, Lynch gets remarkably far with a deceptively simple premise, and he’s not done. Not only does Barnabas privately wonder whether he did, in fact, send Matthew to his death, he’s quick to notice who among his neighbors failed to help quell the flames and to suspect that the fire resulted from arson. (A diary kept by his teenaged son, Billy, suggests that Barnabas may be right, though not for the reasons he believes.) True or not, however, his paranoid fantasies mirror what the villagers say about him, and his deep, angry depression makes him both impossible to live with and incapable of repairing the barn–for awhile, anyway. So nobody in The Black Snow gets off lightly, even when they deserve sympathy; the novel explores a complex moral problem, with no easy answers.

I also admire the prose, which, at its best, is poetic.

The plough still in the tapered field, poised with the lean of an animal in the moment before attack, its teeth bared waiting to tear at the neck of the earth, but it sat with a dog’s patience through days of raw cold and then rain and he had not the strength to go back to it.

However, though I like this passage, there are others I find self-consciously ornate. Lynch is much too fond of fragments, and though the one above works, they don’t always. Further, as I read phrases like “the damask of puzzlement on her face,” I’m puzzled too, enough to pull me out of the narrative. Or I read “That rain came with a venomous slant to cut a man wide open,” and I’m stopped again, wondering why Lynch needs venom on top of cutting someone apart.

And that’s the problem with The Black Snow–it’s over the top. Barnabas Kane (Cain?) eventually gets out of bed and rebuilds his barn, putting his faith in a fresh start. However, the setbacks come pretty hard afterward, and though I applaud these instances of “no; and furthermore,” I don’t believe them, especially when it comes to further violence from Billy and, of all people, Eskra. It feels strange to write this, for I’m one to criticize characters granted redemption they haven’t earned. In such cases, I’m tempted to ascribe that to a desire to appease the reader, a goal often (but not always) more common to commercial rather than literary fiction. But with The Black Snow, the most literary novel I could imagine, I find myself criticizing a narrative that refuses to grant redemption to characters who’ve plainly earned it, dealing out further punishment that’s frankly incredible. Go figure.

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

Life Hangs on Chance: City of Secrets

26 Thursday May 2016

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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.

Lies and More Lies: When the World Was Young

08 Monday Jun 2015

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Review: When the World Was Young, by Elizabeth Gaffney
Random House, 2015. 298 pp. $26

You’d think that V-J Day would bring young Wallace “Wally” Baker a boatload of joy. The war that’s lasted half her life is finally over; her father, a naval officer in the South Pacific, will come home; and maybe the government will end rationing, so that her mother’s chocolate pound cake won’t be such a luxury anymore.

75 Montague Street, Brooklyn Heights, a century-old building (Courtesy Joe Mabel, via Wikimedia Commons).

75 Montague Street, Brooklyn Heights, a century-old building (Courtesy Joe Mabel, via Wikimedia Commons).

But in this moving, beautifully written coming-of-age novel, that day of victory brings Wally heartache, which the adults around her do nothing to assuage, let alone recognize. The grand, ancestral brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, where she lives with her mother and maternal grandparents, offers material comfort, but that’s about all Wally can be thankful for. Stella, her mother, is distant, beautiful, selfish, and neglectful; Wally desperately needs the attention she can never have. To be fair, Stella has suffered tragic losses, including the deaths of a fiancé and a child, and she’s emotionally fragile.

Yet Stella doesn’t entirely realize that her surviving child has a claim on her. And though Wally never wants for good food or clothes or the Wonder Woman comic books she loves, no one in the family sees her as anything but a reflection of themselves. Only when she displeases them do they notice her, usually to punish her for asking questions about secrets they wish to hide, or for speaking her mind. She doesn’t even have a choice about what name she goes by. Wallace is her middle name, inherited from Stella, and Stella refuses to call her any other, as if her daughter were merely a diminutive of herself.

The only adult who cares for Wally is Loretta, the black maid of all work, whose son, Ham, is Wally’s inseparable companion. Wally picks up Ham’s passion for studying ants (an activity with which Gaffney reflects the action, in apt, extended metaphors). More than that, Wally finds in him the affection, praise, shared spirit of adventure, and listener she gets nowhere else. Loretta would be glad to help, but she has white employers to please. She’s not about to answer Wally’s dangerous questions, nor tell her that Ham’s friendship, though genuine, has been sponsored by Stella’s mother in the form of wages. So Loretta does what she can, which is to keep Wally well fed and safe.

The narrative jumps around confusingly in its efforts to stitch the events that precede V-J to that day and its aftermath. Nevertheless, you can see Wally’s slow, insistent progress toward glimpses of ugly truths–race prejudice, adult hypocrisy, betrayals, and class snobbery. Gaffney does a brilliant job filtering Wally’s observations through a painful, endearing, true-to-life naivety that often leads the girl to wild misinterpretations. For instance, she imagines that Mr. Niederman, a mathematician who boards with her family, must be a spy or somehow dangerous. She keeps trying to make what she learns about him fit into her exciting fantasy, missing the more prosaic threat that the reader understands long before she does.

I admire how Gaffney stretches her range with this novel, very different from the sprawling, gritty Metropolis (which I also liked). She shows with When the World Was Young that she can realize subtle scenes on a small stage, a talent I admire. However, like Metropolis, When the World Was Young has its melodramatic moments, which play worse on that smaller stage. Again like its predecessor, When the World Was Young sometimes adopts the knowing tone of portent that I so dislike (“this would be the last time she did blah, blah, blah”), and which undermines the tension rather than heighten it.

But my greatest objection is how the story resolves. Toward the end, three important characters reverse themselves, which I don’t believe, and what’s more, they do it in a twinkling, while the narrative tells the reader how they feel. I wonder whether the author wanted a quick, redemptive finish, instead of staying with the heart-breaking dilemma she’d so carefully crafted.

Still, I recommend When the World Was Young, an excellent novel about the loss of innocence.

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

Scarred Lives: The Jazz Palace

04 Monday May 2015

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Review: The Jazz Palace, by Mary Morris
Doubleday, 2015. 245 pp. $26
It’s 1915, and Chicago’s South Side has its clubs where black musicians assume that the very few white patrons must be there to steal their secrets. But that’s not why young Benny Lehrman hangs around, using the money intended for his piano teacher to bribe his way past the door. Jazz, whose name Benny doesn’t even know at first, reaches him because it says everything the tongue-tied, soulful teenager can’t put into words.

Jazz speaks of loneliness bred in the bone, of having to drag yourself to a job you hate, of desire for the kindness, attention, and sympathy he can never have and believes he doesn’t deserve. Underlying his pain is a family tragedy: Several years before, his younger brother, the family favorite, died in a blizzard. Ever since, Benny has unfairly taken the blame.

However, the novel opens on a different catastrophe. Three of Pearl Chimbrova’s brothers die when the S.S. Eastland rolls over and sinks just after leaving the dock. Benny, who happens to be watching from the same footbridge as Pearl, dives into the water and tries to help, but the bodies he pulls out are already dead. Even without reading the jacket flap, you know Pearl and Benny will meet again.

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Pearl’s mother never recovers, leaving her eldest daughter to pick up the pieces. As the years pass, Pearl takes over more and more responsibility for running the family saloon and mothering her younger sisters. Like Benny, she believes that she doesn’t deserve care or attention. Only routine keeps her going.

For Benny, it’s music, as he pursues learning jazz with a single-mindedness and energy he has never shown toward anything else. When he hears Napoleon Hill on trumpet, he knows why:

Everything he’d ever known about the world–that gravity holds you down and mothers are there when you get home, that baseball has nine innings, and sleep awaits you at the end of the day–was turned upside down. He forgot about his brother lost in the snow and the dead girl he’d danced with when the Eastland went down. . . . He even forgot he was a person in a crowd, not a very old person at that, just a boy. His arms and legs all melted into one. He wasn’t anywhere but inside the music he was hearing.

Napoleon and Benny, African-American and Jew, become close friends and musical partners, drawn together in part by vulnerability. With the advent of Prohibition, Pearl’s saloon has turned into a speakeasy, and Napoleon plays there from time to time, a great risk for a black man to take in a white neighborhood. Naturally, Benny sits in one night, but if you think you know the rest, you’ll have to read this book to see why Morris is too good a novelist to take the low road.

The Chimbrovas, the Lehrmans, Napoleon, every character in this book, even Al Capone, has been emotionally (if not physically) scarred. In this world of pain, in which warm currents drift through–sometimes within reach, sometimes not–there are no answers, only doing what you have to. But there are dreams, for those who dare, whether it’s just to be able to keep going, or to reach for something that might, one day, feel like happiness.

As I’ve said recently, I generally dislike novels about crossed paths, but The Jazz Palace nails it. I could explain that by saying that Morris opens up her characters’ inner lives, gets beneath their skins, and writes lyrically in the bargain. But it’s also that these people, like their creator, know they can’t afford cheap sentiment, and that whatever they want must be earned.

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

Three Hundred Words of Genius

19 Wednesday Nov 2014

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In the past three weeks, I’ve put aside five novels. Each had a good premise, and all were intriguing. But once I got past that, I found nothing to keep me, and after the third misfire, I wanted to know why I couldn’t connect with these stories. After all, I’m a novelist too, and maybe other readers would feel the same about my stuff.

So I went back over the books in my mind, and though each was different, I noticed one common thread: The authors narrated backstory to explain a character’s hopes, dreams, desires, restraints, and impulses. I think I get what the writers were trying to tell me, but that didn’t grab me enough. I was reading a description, not witnessing a character grow before my eyes. So I decided that fact can’t substitute for insight; recounting circumstances doesn’t reveal a character’s inner life. And to me, without that, a novel ain’t got that swing.

This is one reason I admire Wolf Hall, which, if you haven’t run across it, is Hilary Mantel’s novel about Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power at Henry VIII’s court. To say that Mantel writes better than just about anybody these days is neither the reason I put five other novels aside nor very helpful. But taking a good look at the first 300 words of Wolf Hall (297, to be exact) shows me what I was missing and what I wish I could achieve with my own fiction.

The story begins with a beating. Within fifty words, you read that the unnamed victim is flat on the ground, “eyes turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out.” Not rescue him; just help him out, a measure of how he’s learned, perhaps, to curtail his desires. “One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.” His physical disadvantage is obvious, but I also sense his emotional vulnerability.

The next two paragraphs name the father, Walter, and give him speech and actions, all vicious–but the boy has no name. Many have criticized Mantel for being deliberately vague about who’s speaking or thinking throughout the novel, a style that maddens me too, sometimes. But here, I think it’s genius. Just as Walter’s violence feels matter-of-fact, ritual, so does his son’s self-effacement. He’s trying to be small and inert, so that he can escape his father’s blows. All the same, when he hears his dog barking, he thinks, “I’ll miss my dog.” Again, even the dog has a name, and, interestingly, a poetic one, Bella–a lovely touch. But the point is that the boy craves his father’s love, even if he doesn’t say so, even if he doesn’t directly know it.

Then, to end the three hundred words:

Look now, look now,” Walter bellows. He hops on one foot, as if he’s dancing. “Look what I’ve done. Burst my boot, kicking your head.

In this brief opening, I believe that Mantel has distilled the essence of Cromwell’s character, which she’ll weave throughout the novel. He survives as a courtier because he can sense danger almost before his adversary has planned the blow. Walter is a worse tyrant by far than Henry VIII, though just as changeable, so it’s useful training. Cromwell keeps his feelings tightly wrapped, and while he’s generous to waifs and wanderers, like Walter, he can twist people’s arms, but with words. And to the titled men who jockey for power at court, Cromwell, the son of a brewer and blacksmith, has no name. He’s a nobody.

Naturally, the first three hundred words can’t say all this. But they say enough.