Tag Archives: 1968

Heavy Trip: A Thousand Steps

07 Monday Feb 2022

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Review: A Thousand Steps, by T. Jefferson Parker
Forge, 2022. 368 pp. $28

If you’re into the peace-love-tie-dye scene, with or without the accompanying sex and drugs, Laguna Beach, California, is the place to be in summer 1968. Timothy Leary preaches the beauty of LSD to adoring crowds, and every other person, it seems, has a different mantra of self-enlightenment.

However, sixteen-year-old Matt Anthony watches most of this from the sidelines. He’s too busy trying to put food on the table, because his mother, hooked on opium-laced hashish, can’t. His older brother, Kyle, fighting in Vietnam, worries he won’t make it out alive, and Matt worries too. Their father? He’s a deadbeat, a former cop who mouths off about discipline and keeps promising to visit one day from whatever state he’s just fled to, a lie Matt has heard for seven years.

A Pageant of the Masters tableau vivant of a chess game evoking the battle of Waterloo, 2012. Laguna Beach holds the pageant every summer, and the 1968 edition figures in the novel (courtesy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2F4cZ0Lsao, via Wikimedia Commons)

But just when life could not get worse, Matt’s older sister, Jasmine, has disappeared. At first, he thinks Jazz has merely let loose after graduating high school, but he comes to believe she’s been kidnapped. And since the police assume that Jazz is simply another drug-addled hippie on a bender, it’s up to Matt to rescue her.

How he goes about it makes for a tense, plot-driven thriller, where the ambience feels pitch-perfect. Parker captures Matt’s hand-to-mouth existence, in which he delivers newspapers practically for pennies, fishes off the rocks to get protein, and cadges meals of leftovers from friends who work in restaurant kitchens. He tries to avoid the war between cops and hippies, views anyone over thirty as “old,” and sympathizes with the antiwar protesters who chant, “Hell, no, we won’t go!”

Parker’s careful about social and cultural markers, and Matt immediately sizes up everyone he sees according to the pecking order that places him at or near the bottom, a clever touch. The only glaring false note in this otherwise exacting portrayal is how brother Kyle enlists despite drawing a safe draft lottery number, when the first lottery actually took place in late 1969. To me, overlooking that easily researchable fact suggests a characterization overreach, which I’ll get to in a moment. Otherwise, this novel has a recognizable Sixties vibe:

The store is crowded with shoppers, most young and well-haired, wearing loose clothes and smothered in bags — bags with straps over their backs or shoulders or around their waists, bags in their hands, bags on their arms and at their elbows — sewn bags, knit bags, woven bags, bags featuring feathers and seashells, wooden amulets, ceramic zodiacal symbols, and beads, beads, beads. Matt’s young instincts tell him that this world of mystic arts is funny and crazy and maybe a little dangerous. He feels an undertow of arousal every time he walks in.

Parker throws obstacles in Matt’s path every step of the way. The boy has his mother’s drug habit and fecklessness to contend with, a cop who wants to break him, bad guys of all stripes (including those masquerading as good guys), and vicious types all too willing to prey on a young, defenseless kid down on his luck. “No — and furthermore” thrives here.

Where A Thousand Steps falters is the characterization, often two-dimensional, as with Kyle’s allegedly superfluous self-sacrifice. I believe the portrayals of Matt’s mother and a cop — not the one who wants to take Matt down — and a few other “oldsters,” but not those of the kids. Matt’s about the most upstanding person in Laguna Beach, and though you want him to carry a certain moral weight, he’s too upright, respectful, and open. Given such a selfish, neglectful, dishonest parents, I don’t understand why he isn’t more like them, or at least struggling not to be. It’s as though, in this coming-of-age novel, the protagonist has already figured out this youth thing and gotten good at it.

Most obviously, he’s got no adolescent anger or rebelliousness, though he has more right to them than many people making noise in Laguna Beach. He’s also much too trusting, to the point that when his father (an over-the-top superpatriot) interrogates him about his sex life, he answers, without a qualm. No qualms, either, about opposing the Vietnam War, though Kyle’s in it; the narrative pays lip service to that moral complexity and zips onward. As for the two girls attracted to Matt, they’re types, with good looks and social and cultural markers, but little in the way of inner life.

Finally, the end disappointed me; after such careful plotting, I didn’t expect the hackneyed, predictable confrontations. The romance subplot also takes an odd twist, with little afterthought. Consequently, A Thousand Steps is a strange amalgam, a novel with an intensely strong physical presence yet flimsy characters, a highly inventive narrative that somehow loses its sure-handedness at the climax. Take that for what you will.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review.

From Auschwitz to Australia: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

08 Monday Jul 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spy Family: Paris Spring

16 Monday Apr 2018

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Review: Paris Spring, by James Naughtie
Overlook, 2016. 320 pp. $27

Will Flemyng, who works undercover for the British Embassy in Paris, is accosted on the métro by an East German agent named Kristof. At first, Will wonders whether Kristof is willing to trade information or change sides, and since it’s April 1968, and talk of democracy in Prague has the Soviet bloc on edge, Kristof’s sudden appearance offers possibilities.

Or does it? A subsequent rendezvous turns testy when Kristof threatens to expose Will’s brother, Abel, who spies for the United States, as a traitor. Will refuses to believe him or be bullied. But he also keeps his own counsel, because this is family, and the Flemyngs are close, matter of state or no. So Will doesn’t tell his boss, Freddy Craven, all he should, and there too lie emotional ties. Freddy’s like a father to Will, an older man in ill health who’s shown him the ropes of tradecraft, and for whom Will would risk anything.

Meanwhile, the student population has fomented rebellion, and the streets are boiling. The embassy is expected to watch these events carefully, and in return, with so much focus on Paris, any diplomatic mistake will quickly become public knowledge. Freddy, like any sensitive soul, realizes something’s up with Will, but he doesn’t know what. A love affair that ended a few months before? The tensions of the job? But before that question can be resolved, Grace Quincy, a world-famous journalist who could pry secrets from a clam without having to open it, blows into Paris. Will, knowing that Grace is trouble and that her flirtatious attentions mean she’s digging for information, nevertheless invites her over. But before that happens, she’s murdered at Père-Lachaise cemetery, of all places, and the police quickly learn that Will’s name is on her dance card. It’s obvious that one side or other had her killed, for reasons of espionage, but who, and why?

Pierre_Mendès_France, the Socialist politician who had helped extricate France from Vietnam, was willing to form a coalition government in May 1968 and listen to the student demands. But the Gaullists increased their power in the next election (courtesy Dutch National Archives via Wikimedia Commons)

Naughtie excels at portraying Paris under siege and the student protests:

. . .the canteen in the student building was filled with a rolling crowd and had the air of a cavernous bar in the early hours, a dance hall with the lights down. There was a group in one corner listening to a guitar, some of them flat out on the floor, and across the room an argument was threatening to turn into a struggle. Somebody ran shouting from the room. At least five people were handing out newspapers and campaign sheets at the door, one of them wearing a Mao cap, the others in black.…Someone was cooking oil. A few on the floor looked as if they’d slept there for days and the place looked like a school gymnasium on a wet afternoon. They’d rigged up an urn to boil water for coffee, and people were pulling stale bread rolls from a cardboard box. Someone had brought in a cat, which sat on top of the jukebox with its tail rigid in the air and its eyes wide.

But good as that is, it’s just the vivid background. The real story involves two families. First, it’s the Flemyngs, and how the brothers balance their feelings and ties against the secrecy demanded by their work, which affects a third, older brother, Mungo. Until reading Paris Spring, I didn’t know I wanted an older brother named Mungo, but it helps that this one is supportive, caring, and paternal, without being pushy or controlling, the family mediator. Mungo comes to know Freddy as well, so there’s plenty of warmth to go around in this coldest of cold-blooded professions.

The other family consists of Will’s allies, foremost among them Freddy, of course, but also others encountered during his travails over Kristof. Rivalries exist, to be sure, but even as temporary friends, they stick together. They know better than anyone else what the power of secrets can do, especially those that may or may not exist, except in rumor. As Freddy tells Mungo, who’s a historian, “You warn your students of the fog of war. Well, I know it to be real. I breathe the fumes.”

Naughtie’s grasp of spydom as a brethren echoes John le Carré, and the same could be said of his focus on characterization. Paris Spring fails to emulate the master in that it resolves with a couple turns that may be too neat; another neatness is how indulgent Freddy is with Will, which strains credulity at times. Nevertheless, Paris Spring is an excellent thriller, elegant in the way le Carré’s are — as few moving narrative parts as possible, a focus on motive instead, and characters who believe in what they’re doing. Bravo.

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