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Why Prologues (Almost) Never Work: After the Party

27 Monday May 2019

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Not Exactly a Review: After the Party, by Cressida Connolly
Pegasus, 2019. 272 pp. $26

Phyllis Forrester enjoys a sheltered life in 1938 Sussex, frightened only of her priggish, domineering husband, Hugh, and her two grasping, manipulative sisters, who live nearby. At a fancy-dress ball, the party of the title, Phyllis fails to protect a friend and suffers for it ever afterward — or so she says.

But the novel really concerns the Forresters’ support for a political movement that preaches “England first,” rejection of foreigners, and nonintervention in the European war that threatens. Students of that era will guess that it’s Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union, but Connolly, a subtle storyteller, doesn’t reveal that identifier right away. I suspect that before she pastes the Fascist label on her characters, she wants you to realize that they’re little different from people everyone has met, if perhaps more selfish or snobbish than most. Likewise, Phyllis’s refusal to examine or even admit to her spouse’s and siblings’ condescension and cruelty toward her evokes her inability to read fascism for what it is.

As political observation, After the Party has much to recommend it, especially the spare yet vivid portrayal of attitudes. As a novel, however, it frustrates me; and because explaining why involves spoilers, I suggest that anyone who plans to read the book should stop here.

The narrative actually begins in 1979, in Phyllis’s internal monologue looking back at the terrible event after the party and her subsequent imprisonment. When I read historical fiction, I like to lose myself in the past, so I avoid novels that feature a parallel, contemporary narrative (this one got in under my radar). But that’s not my beef here.

For those of you who don’t write novels, let me plead for those who do. One of the hardest decisions is where and how to begin, and if you choose wrongly, you can doom your narrative from the get-go. It sounds easy to fix or recognize, but it isn’t; just think of how many novels burden the narrative with too much backstory, too soon. In this case, Connolly’s prologue, which precedes a very long backstory, suggests that the party and Phyllis’s imprisonment are connected. In fact, they occur two years apart, and Phyllis later backs off her belief that she regards her prison time as just punishment for her mistake. Consequently, when you reach the party scene and realize there’s no connection, if you’re like me, you feel a letdown and wonder why the author thought she had to manipulate you with that prologue.

I think Connolly hopes to tie together disparate elements that don’t fit in the order they appear. If she does this to save her description of what makes a Fascist, that’s an idea, a theme, not a story, however interesting or cogent it might be. But two-thirds of the way through the book, after the war starts, Phyllis and Hugh are arrested and interned without trial or even legal counsel for having supported the British Union. That’s a story, especially because one of her sisters, active in the movement far longer, somehow remains free. Should the novel begin there, then? Maybe.

I can’t presume to know whether Connolly fell in love with her backstory and tries to save it through Phyllis’s occasional latter-day observations (which, incidentally, interrupt the forward narrative with privileged information). All I can say is that, as a writer, I’ve messed up enough novels by falling in love with backstory that either doesn’t belong or should go somewhere else. If I’ve learned my lesson, it’s because of the more than three hundred novels I’ve read so as to write in these pages. Many have prologues, yet only once do I recall an instance where that technique works — Andrew Hilleman’s World, Chase Me Down. And he succeeds not because he shows a crime, a high-wire act, a steamy love scene, or a courtroom verdict, teasing the reader with the mystery or romance to come. Rather, within the first lines, he establishes the sense of urgency that all compelling stories have — and if a novel lacks that, it doesn’t matter what the author dangles in your face to keep your interest.

Test this for yourself. The next time you start a novel, see whether you feel connected to the protagonist’s urgency about what makes this moment different, special, even earthshaking. I’m willing to bet that if you don’t feel this within the first five pages, you’re not likely to make it to page 50. And if you do read that far, it’s not because of a prologue.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, in which this commentary appears in a different, shorter form.

Blood and Money: House of Gold

18 Monday Feb 2019

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Review: House of Gold, by Natasha Solomons
Putnam, 2018. 433 pp. $26

Greta Goldbaum, a spirited young woman in 1911 Vienna who thinks nothing of going barefoot when her shoes pinch or contesting conventions that make no sense to her, dreams of choosing her own life. Alas, Vienna’s no place for free spirits, nor is the Goldbaum family the type to tolerate them. As international bankers (patterned after the Rothschilds), the Goldbaums have branches in various European capitals, connected by blood ties, common interests, and a remarkable network of couriers. So it is that distant Goldbaum cousins traditionally intermarry, which is why Greta has been betrothed to her kinsman Albert, in London, whom she’s never met. Neither of them has any say in the match.

But that doesn’t mean Greta has to like her bridegroom, or vice versa, and from her point of view, there’s much to dislike. Pedantic, dull, and as straight-laced as they come, Albert has one great passion, collecting butterflies. Greta finds that utterly appalling and cruel. For his part, Albert fears that his stubborn, immodest wife is always seconds away from attracting the wrong kind of attention and creating a scandal.

Passing of the Parliament Bill of 1911 in the House of Lords, Samuel Begg (courtesy Gutenberg Project via Wikimedia Commons)

I seldom read sagas because, fairly or not, I assume them to involve melodrama, contrivance, and an obsession with the surfaces of wealth and power that don’t interest me. But I made an exception for House of Gold, and I’m glad I did. Solomons needs no melodrama or contrivance to tell her tale, because she adeptly introduces the unexpected without resorting to plot twists. A passing sight or ordinary occurrence, unremarkable in itself, becomes a focal point for the characters to seek meaning. Consequently, Greta and Albert reveal their many facets naturally, as does most of the rather large cast of characters. Toward the end, the narrative veers toward contrivance, but even there, Solomons reclaims these moments somewhat by having her characters grapple with their humility.

Also, Solomons has tackled a thorny subject, the bigoted canard about Jews and money, and done so with surehanded brio. If anyone or anything purely represents anti-Semitic delusions, it’s the Rothschilds, which demands that an author conduct a deep, consequential examination of wealth and power. House of Gold delivers. It portrays the delicate balance the Goldbaums must strike, aware that however wealthy and/or ennobled they are, they’re outsiders and always will be. Their family name may permit a demarche in the halls of government, even to the palace or the prime minister’s office, but they know what’s said about them and how precarious their reputations are. Moreover, none can ever be sure that outsiders deal with them candidly; something’s always in play, even in the wedding presents lavished on Greta and Albert:

Two saloons had been set aside for this purpose, and yet still they were not large enough. Clients of the Goldbaums from all over Europe had sent tokens expressing felicity and gratitude, and the silent hope of generous terms in future negotiations. Tables heaved with silver dinner services from President Fallières, and Persian rugs from Emperor Franz Joseph himself. The British empire was expressed in miniature: hand-painted wallpaper from China, a carved chest from the maharajas of Rajasthan filled with finely colored rugs, an ivory jewelry box from Ceylon.… Greta escaped the minute she could, wishing that so many strangers had not been quite so generous, requiring so many hundreds of thank-you letters. If she had remained a moment longer she might have overheard Albert remark that he found the habit of ingratiating gift-giving obsequious and excessive.

Solomons means to recount history, and to some extent, she manages. Against the Goldbaum backdrop, she portrays the Liberal reform of 1911, which diminished the power of the House of Lords; the rise of feminism; and, most significantly to the plot, the First World War, which threatens to destroy the banking house and the family. I like how she conveys the home front, in its shortages and prejudices, the latter of which keep Greta from venturing out where people will hear her Austrian accent. Less successful or convincing is the narrative conceit that America entered the war to protect the extensive loans made to the Allies, a notion that serves the plot but not history and involves an information dump or three.

My other serious complaint involves Otto, Greta’s beloved brother, who needs a flaw or two and more depth in general. I understand the forces that restrain him, but though he appears to have dreams as wide as the heavens — he’s a brilliant astronomer — I don’t know what they are.

Still, I like House of Gold and think it’s worth reading for the central issues explored, the two principal characters, and the myriad details of everyday life that emerge from the narrative.

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

Between Two Fires: Sugar Money

29 Monday Oct 2018

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Review: Sugar Money, by Jane Harris
Arcade, 2018. 387 pp. $25

No more callous, lunatic scheme was ever devised. It’s 1765, and Father Cléophas of the Frères de la Charité in St. Pierre, Martinique, is plotting to recapture slaves left behind when his brethren and he fled Grenada from British forces. Cléophas has a paper that, he claims, grants him power of attorney over his lost property. But that sounds dubious even to the two slave brothers he orders to sail to Grenada, Emile and Lucien, so the British are unlikely to listen. The only hope of success, Emile believes, lies with persuasion and stealth, treating directly with the fellow slaves his brother and he grew up with. Cléophas is a brute, and several of his colleagues are worse, but the British slave masters outdo them. Will the slaves on Grenada leave one island for another, if Emile can convince them that servitude on Martinique will be better?

St.-Pierre, Martinique, as it appeared in 2008. In 1902, the eruption of Mt. Pelée (in the background) killed 28,000 people and destroyed the entire town (courtesy Zinneke via Wikimedia Commons)

Much hinges on the relationship between Emile, twenty-eight, and Lucien, thirteen. The elder, who grasps the danger, tries to leave the younger behind. But perhaps because of pride, Emile fails to explain how vulnerable they’ll be — an admission he can’t easily make — while Lucien, who idealizes his brother, lacks the maturity to see outside his own concerns. Rather, he assumes that Emile is swatting him away, as always, and since he wants people to take him as a man and earn big brother’s respect, he insists on going. Besides, since he can read a little and speak some English, neither of which Emile can do, Cléophas decides that Lucien must go.

What a breathtaking premise, laden with potential for heartbreak and transcendence. Harris delivers, on all counts. Sugar Money is a compelling, unusual story, riveting from start to finish. “No — and furthermore” lives in these pages, and the moral stakes are enormous, the secret to extraordinary fiction. Vivid as a prose poem seasoned with kréyol phrases, the novel succeeds on many levels — as adventure, a tale of another time, a narrative of sibling rivalry, and an exposé of colonialism.

It’s the prose that takes you first, though, Lucien’s narration, lush and rhythmic:

Some masters are swift to get to the point when they give instruction; you might say they go directly to the main door, cross the threshold, no hesitation. Father Cléophas was not one of these. He would walk around the property first, try the windows, then wander off into the garden to gaze at the roof before eventually he retrace his steps to the front of the dwelling and give a tentative knock and — whiles he went on this bumbling circumbendibus — you oblige to go with him. . . .With this rigmarole and in other ways, Cléophas like to cultivate the impression of being an absent-minded, kindly fellow and he would beguile you with that bilge awhile until you became better acquainted and began to cognise just how sly he could be, for true.

Much of the story revolves around Lucien’s refusal to follow directions, and Emile’s belief in his considerable skills at diplomacy and leadership, which play out between the brothers as well as in their mission. With the odds so great against them, there’s no room for error, and the narrative feels unbearably tense.

My only criticism of Sugar Money is that, at times, Harris employs physical clichés for Lucien’s emotional transitions — heartbeat, guts, etc. — when she’s otherwise careful to render those moments more specifically and genuinely. But that’s an intermittent, minor, complaint.

Instead, my biggest quarrel is with the publicist who decided that the first thing to mention on the jacket flap is how a true story inspired the novel. Does that matter? Is that why people read fiction, and would they move over to the nonfiction shelf if Harris had made everything up? Just as historical truth can’t rescue a narrative that seems implausible, the ability to weave human truth into historical fiction makes it irrelevant whether events happened exactly as written. Is the publisher underestimating the reading public, or is that lack of confidence warranted?

But if we’re talking history, recall that by the Treaty of Paris in 1763 ending the Seven Years’ War (aka the French and Indian War), Britain, which had conquered several Caribbean islands, kept Grenada, among others, while returning Martinique and still others to France. That’s the geopolitical outline behind Sugar Money, but, in reading how these slaves suffer, I couldn’t help take the timeline further. Britain’s attempt to pay for that long, expensive conflict led to taxes on tea and newspapers in North America and cries of “no taxation without representation.” But the slaves on Martinique and Grenada, caught between French and British fires, had much more to complain about.

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

The Bad Penny: Friends and Traitors

17 Monday Sep 2018

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Review: Friends and Traitors, by John Lawton
Atlantic, 2017. 341 pp. $26

If I were to describe a thriller whose central incident doesn’t happen until around page 200, and whose back-story-laden narrative revolves around an essentially harmless, flamboyantly foolish turncoat spy, you would likely decide that the book was a plodding, pointless tale, not worth your time.

In this case, though, you’d be wrong. The back story reveals England of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties with remarkable vividness, brio, and wit, focusing on, among other issues, laws and prejudice against homosexual behavior, and the equally prejudiced mindset about national security and how to act in its name. You see these come alive through a compelling protagonist, Frederick Troy, not your ordinary copper. Born to Russian émigrés under the name Troitsky, Troy, as even his girlfriends call him, walked away from a scholarship to Oxford to join the London police force and serve in the East End, a tough patch. Recruited to Scotland Yard above more experienced candidates in the late 1930s, he has been solving murders ever since, up until 1958, when the forward action of Friends and Traitors begins. Like many fictional detectives, he sails very close to the wind, and unscrupulous, vicious characters have a way of disappearing when he’s around, whether they belong to the police force or the criminals. So far, he has covered his tracks, but not without attracting suspicion.

Henry_Labouchère, the British parliamentarian whose amendment to an 1885 law intended to combat prostitution made “gross indecency” between males a criminal act. During the 1940s and 1950s especially, the police went out of their way to enforce it.

What threatens to undo Troy at this juncture is his friendship with Guy Burgess, later known as a member of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring; but, as this portrayal would have it, Burgess is very much a junior partner in that game. Still, when he defects with Donald Maclean in 1951, their flight embarrasses and surprises the British intelligence community and causes a rift with its American counterparts. Troy, who has known Burgess for decades, first through family connections, and later because the man keeps crossing his path like a bad penny, has always been suspect for this association. But Troy thinks that what MI5 and Special Branch really object to, aside from shame at their own lapse, is Burgess’s unapologetic, open homosexuality, which to Troy shouldn’t be considered a crime.

Moreover, Burgess’s inability to keep a secret, and the relatively short time he was working for the Foreign Office, suggest he’s not much of a threat. Self-absorbed, boorish, insulting, and vain, yes; but since when are those qualities treasonous? Nevertheless, when Burgess lets it be known in 1958 that he wishes to return to England, several people whom both he and Troy know wind up dead, and others are running scared, including at least one former lover of Troy’s.

From there, the pieces that Lawton has laid in place with seeming casualness turn out to matter in ingenious, unexpected ways, so cleverly that not even Troy understands the depth of his troubles before they arrive. The sentence, “Someone was following Troy,” recurs constantly. For a man of his experience, that’s almost an insult. And since he never takes his medicine quietly, he leads his watchdogs in Special Branch up hill and down dale, at one point leaving a Lewis Carroll poem in a tree for them to puzzle over. Very snarky. But what else would you expect from the youngest child with two twin sisters named Sasha and Masha, each of whom has a particular brand of acting badly, and an oh-so-righteous older brother, Battle of Britain hero, member of Parliament, and all that, who may be prime minister one day? It’s always been Troy’s job to be different in a family of individualists, and he does so with a sharp sense of humor.

Then there’s the prose, which evokes myriad times and places, as with this description of the London Blitz:

It seemed to Troy that the night sky was short on sky’s own colour — blue. Reds it had aplenty, from the bright, post-office-van scarlet of the flames that leapt heavenward from burning buildings to the colouring-book-and-wax-crayon carmine of tracers and the paintbox burnt orange of ack-ack shells popping uselessly among the beaten-metal pewter hue of the barrage balloons. Incendiaries burnt white to silver, and the searchlights sliced up the night with long fingers of pure, clear light. Rarely had he seen a plane hit, either ours or theirs, but when it happened every colour in the rainbow might burst forth.

My only quibble is Burgess himself, who’s so unappealing that if I were Troy, I’d run in the other direction. At times Troy does, yet he also seems fascinated, and I’m not sure why. Burgess’s willingness to say what no one else will? Troy’s stubborn refusal to shun a man whom his conventional older brother has warned him about? Hard to know, but I still recommend Friends and Traitors.

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

The Warm-Blooded Detective: The Inheritance

19 Monday Mar 2018

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Review: The Inheritance, by Charles Finch
St. Martin’s, 2016. 294 pp. $26

Charles Lenox, a partner in a thriving London detective agency in the late 1870s, receives a vague plea for help from Gerald Leigh, a friend he’s barely seen since their schoolboy days at Harrow. When Charles looks into the matter, he learns that Gerald has disappeared — and what’s more, may be marked for murder because he’s just come into a sizable, unexpected inheritance.

As a latecomer to the Charles Lenox series, I’m delighted to recommend The Inheritance, not only for itself but as a refreshing change from many mysteries published these days, historical or otherwise. Instead of a sullen, troubled misfit for a sleuth, which has perhaps become a cliché, Finch offers a warm, sensitive protagonist in Charles Lenox, devoted to his wife and their young daughter. Where the typical “amateur” struggles with a grudging Scotland Yard, a conflict that goes back to Conan Doyle, Charles works in concert with the Yard and befriends its officers. (Note that the story takes place before Sherlock Holmes would have hung out his shingle.)

A former member of Parliament, Lenox belongs to the ruling class, and he married an aristocratic wife, yet he chafes at the government’s slowness to enact reforms for the general good. Where the vast majority of Victorian gentlemen would take superiority over women for granted, Charles freely acknowledges that one of his partners, Polly Buchanan, is both a better detective and a more effective executive than he.

A drawing of Burlington House, the London home of the Royal Society, from the Illustrated London News, 1873 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

In fact, this paragon has no discernible faults, unless you count complete boredom at the notion of germ theory, a controversial scientific issue of the day (and one that figures in the mystery). Yet the milk of human kindness makes a winning, comforting drink, even in a tale about greed and murder, and though the ending may be too tidy, how Finch narrates his story adds nuance.

Firstly, nothing ever goes as expected, and I don’t mean just the essential “no — and furthermore” to disappoint Lenox’s hopes. Rather, the narrative presents a stream of surprises, many for the reader, not the protagonist. For example, early on, Charles returns home from an investigation through the snow-bound streets to find “a young woman in a slim gray coat” waiting at his door. A relation? A client? A lover? No; it’s Polly, and you soon find out she runs the show.

Secondly, Finch takes care to give his character strong inner lives. The story of Charles’s unusual friendship with Gerald at Harrow takes up a good portion of the book, yet it doesn’t feel like a discursion or a distraction, and Finch deftly connects it to the main story and uses it to show how Lenox first became interested in detection. That’s a major part of the author’s approach, to explore his characters’ dreams outside the present moment. I also like the way he reveals the depth of feelings, trying to make them specific and concrete, rather than telling you in an abstract phrase:

He would never forget sitting alone in the duke’s grand music room that afternoon. There had been a hundred evenings of amusement and celebration here. Now it was as desolate as an empty ocean, the light going iron gray as the sun faded, the carefully situated picture frames and sofas and silver bowls each reproached by their own frivolity. It was intensely sad. In Lenox’s mind was the business of the next day. The terrible black-edged paper would have to be bought; the terrible black-edged envelopes; the terrible black wax, to seal the news in forever…

Which brings up the question of prose. It’s exuberant without affectation, the dialogue feels natural, and wit punctuates the narrative: “Lenox was rarely in such an acid mood, and Kirk [the butler] inclined his head deferentially to the celebrity of the moment.”

On top of all that, Finch manages to convey the era from the inside, something that many historical mysteries stint on. This novel, however, brings you into the Royal Society, and the fascination with science that hints at why the Victorian Age produced so many discoveries and innovations. As a bonus, you get explanations of words or traditions, such as why the British drive on the left, and Americans, the right. (Hint: It has to do with knights in the first instance, and wagons in the second.)

There are many grittier mysteries around, in which people are naturally vicious, and some of these novels are brilliant. Perhaps The Inheritance goes too far to the other extreme. Yet it remains very appealing, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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

Surrendering to Fear: Munich

05 Monday Mar 2018

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Review: Munich, by Robert Harris
Knopf, 2018. 303 pp. $28

Robert Harris has a knack for turning intense historical events into political thrillers, as with An Officer and a Spy (the Dreyfus affair); Aquarius Rising (the destruction of Pompeii); or Dictator (Cicero’s attempt to save the Roman Republic). Harris’s best narratives immerse you so thoroughly that he persuades you to hope that history will unfold less tragically than it does, though you also know that’s impossible. Not only does this make for terrific storytelling, you can see how small moments lead to earth-shattering ones, and therefore how history might have happened differently.

With Munich, about Neville Chamberlain’s pursuit of “peace in our time” in 1938, which dismembered Czechoslovakia for Hitler’s benefit without even consulting the Czechs, Harris hasn’t quite reached those heights. I never for one second doubted that the appeasers would appease, nor did I even dream of them having second thoughts. But I admire Munich nevertheless, as a completely riveting story, with “no — and furthermore” aplenty; a re-creation of an era that leaps off the page; and an ingenious, briskly paced rendering of complex events that somehow doesn’t feel condensed.

With An Officer and a Spy and Dictator, Harris uses historical figures to spearhead his narratives, but in Munich, he can’t. Chamberlain’s cabinet contained only one or two ministers who favored standing up to Hitler, and the prime minister made sure to leave them behind in London. So, without a historical figure to push back and create conflict, Harris invents Hugh Legat, a rising star in the diplomatic corps and a junior private secretary to Chamberlain. Hugh’s growing opposition to appeasement raises the stakes, especially once he gains possession of a state secret that Hitler would kill to protect. Hugh’s opposite number in the German delegation, Paul von Hartmann, is an old friend and former Oxford classmate. He too wishes Britain and France would stand up to the Führer, and belongs to a nascent, disorganized resistance movement that wishes to depose him.

This is why Munich never attains the suspension of disbelief that drives the other novels. We do get a full portrait of Chamberlain in his arrogant stubbornness, dictatorial style, and, to some extent, his vanity, but also his sincere belief that he’s acting in Britain’s interests. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he’s a sympathetic character, because when you see how lonely he is, you also see the snobbery and bigotry that prompt him to push others away. It’s also one thing to swallow a con job by Hermann Göring and believe that the Luftwaffe could raze London in six weeks, and another to reject, out of hand, any evidence or argument to the contrary. Still, when he claims, pathetically, that he’s also done the right thing for Czechoslovakia, you see how much he wants it to be true. But since he’s immovable, the two underlings, Legat and Hartmann, matter more here, except that they stand at the periphery of history, with little or no power to influence it.

Neville Chamberlain holds the paper that he believes will bring permanent peace to Europe, Heston Aerodrome, London, September 30, 1938 (Imperial War Museum, London, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

However, there are compensations, for the novel revolves around the choices the pair must make and what allegiances they’ll uphold. Hugh’s the more successful characterization – stolid, unspontaneous, but more perceptive than his chiefs, capable of seeing the larger picture and trying to do the right thing in the long run. Yet in his private life, fearful of losing his beautiful, wayward, and mercurial wife, he backs away from confronting her infidelities. Harris never says he’s an appeaser like Chamberlain, but he doesn’t have to, delivering the parallel with a light touch.

Paul von Hartmann’s harder to pin down. He understands Nazism’s mythic power but hates the regime (and, for the longest time, it’s not clear why). Yet he remains a nationalist, a nuance essential to his politics and surely representative, but less clear or convincing on the page. The depth of his former closeness to Hugh (or even that they both attended Oxford) remains a secret from the reader for too long, a lack of authorial generosity that surprises me with this author.

But, as with Hugh, you see Paul’s milieu as clearly as if it were yesterday, and he’s an excellent guide. Typical is this passage about his office mates:

They weren’t such bad fellows, Hartmann thought. He had mixed with their type all his life: patriotic, conservative, clannish. For them, Hitler was like some crude gamekeeper who had mysteriously contrived to take over the running of their family estates: once installed, he had proved an unexpected success, and they had consented to tolerate his occasional bad manners and lapses into violence in return for a quiet life. Now they had discovered they couldn’t get rid of him and they looked as if they were starting to regret it.

If Munich were only a brilliant evocation of the era and its tensions and hopes, the novel would be well worth reading. But it’s more than that, and I heartily recommend it.

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

Sins of the Father: Enchantress of Numbers

29 Monday Jan 2018

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Review: Enchantress of Numbers, by Jennifer Chiaverini
Dutton, 2017. 433 pp. $27

He’s magnetic as few people are, well titled, brilliant, a poetic genius, utterly debauched, and what would today be called manic-depressive. Her parents try to warn her, but Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke, Baroness of Wentworth, will have her Lord Byron, believing that ardent love and a spotless moral example will cure him of his excesses. It’s 1815, the year of Waterloo, and a different sort of battle is about to begin.

Annabella’s delusion receives a sharp setback on her wedding day, and though the Byrons pass a few companionable weeks, during which Annabella becomes pregnant, their marriage quickly falls apart. Lord Byron prefers other women, especially his half-sister, Augusta, and only someone as innocent as Annabella could have failed to realize how deep that preference runs. By the time Annabella’s daughter is born, and he insists on naming her Augusta, as is his legal right, his long-suffering wife begins to get the idea. Shortly afterward, Annabella leaves Byron, a scandal so infamous the separation is forever referred to with a capital S. Henceforth, she calls her daughter only by her middle name, Ada, and sets out to eradicate any presence of her former husband, real or perceived. She decides that an overwrought imagination led to Byron’s depravity, and she watches her young child for that or any other evidence of “evil Byron blood.” Whenever Ada shows the least sign of willfulness, subversion, or curiosity deemed repugnant, Annabella leaves home, putting Ada in the hands of hirelings who enjoy correcting her every fault, many of which exist only in their eyes, and determined that no fairytales, flights of fancy, or moments spent ruminating ever be part of this young girl’s life.

I confess I have a visceral reaction to this novel, which could be subtitled How to Destroy a Child. I wanted to rescue this poor girl from parental tyranny and show her kindness, warmth, and encouragement. However, the stakes are even higher than that of an emotionally strangled child, for Ada is preternaturally intelligent, passionate about science, and a born mathematician. Luckily, Annabella tolerates this to some extent, or the world would have lost a genius. Known to history as Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s only legitimate child has been credited by some historians as having devised the first computer algorithm, in a journal article discussing the work of her close friend, Charles Babbage. But, as Chiaverini tells it, all this could have easily gone another way.

How this comes to be shapes the narrative, but Enchantress of Numbers is much more than a biographical novel, a genre that too often shows its limitations. Chiaverini succeeds brilliantly, in part because each chapter has its “no — and furthermore” and portrays Ada’s struggles lucidly. She longs to make her own decisions, and, as she gets older, to gain recognition for her science, not as an ornament to her father’s misbegotten reputation. Even better, Chiaverini carries these conflicts through Ada’s adulthood, and they never recede. Her mother remains withholding, elusive, and controlling; and men are men, with rights and privileges Ada can never claim. Moreover, though Ada counts among her friends such luminaries as Darwin, Dickens, Faraday, and Mary Somerville (Ada’s mentor, a brilliant polymath for whom a college at Oxford is now named), most scientists dismiss her work as dabbling, simply because she’s a woman. No doubt Countess Lovelace would have understood implicitly the endemic sexism in today’s Silicon Valley and have much to say about it.

Watercolor portrait of Ada King, Countess Lovelace, 1840 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, via Science and Society Picture Library)

But feminism aside, Enchantress of Numbers is also about a corrosive mother-daughter relationship and the rivalries that Annabella exploits for her own advantage. No question that Byron abused her, and since his subsequent poems satirize her mercilessly, she continues to suffer. But she passes on the punishment with interest, constricting Ada within an inch of her life while not letting her read the poems, so that the girl’s only knowledge of her father comes from her mother’s harangues. Even his family portrait is hidden in her grandparents’ house:

Whenever I was feeling especially brave, I would steal into the room alone and gaze up at the covered portrait, wondering what lay behind the dark green curtain. What did my father look like? Of course I did not remember . . . . There must be something truly terrible about his appearance or my grandmother would not have hidden him from view. . . . In my imagination — that wicked, persistent faculty — he became a chimera of the magnificent and the monstrous. . . . and . . . Since I was his child, something sinister and dangerous lurked within me too.

I wish that Chiaverini had devoted more space to Ada’s emotional reckonings late in her short life, though I understand why the author didn’t go that way. Enchantress of Numbers is lengthy as it is. But it’s utterly riveting as well as topical, and I highly recommend it.

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

Class Conflict: The Summer Before the War

28 Monday Aug 2017

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Review: The Summer Before the War, by Helen Simonson
Random House, 2017. 479 pp. $28

That last, idyllic English summer of 1914, Hugh Grange, a young medical student, has come to rural Sussex to visit his beloved Aunt Agatha and Uncle John. As the protegé of a famous surgeon who has all but invited him to marry his pretty daughter, Hugh may be forgiven for thinking he has the world on a string. However, two obstacles emerge to his plans.

Obviously, one is the coming conflict, of which just about everyone remains blithely ignorant in this lovely town of Rye. The other is Beatrice Nash, a young woman hired to teach Latin at the Rye grammar school, a subject traditionally a male preserve. She owes her job to Aunt Agatha, a closet feminist but no “suffragette,” who has politicked, plotted, and flattered to get the old-boy network to accept her protegée. Beatrice is intellectual, serious, and a freethinker–much like Hugh–whereas the surgeon’s daughter is a flirt, a twit, and a social climber. So there’s even less doubt whom he’ll prefer than what’s about to happen to Europe.

That predictability plagues much of The Summer Before the War. Simonson sets her battle lines right away, so that you can tell the good guys from the bad guys, or, when there’s less question of good versus bad, who’ll survive and who won’t. Her upper-class characters are completely detestable, but they’re stick figures, mere attitudes on two legs, and therefore easy targets. To cast doubt on what seems ordained, Simonson employs the “no–and futhermore,” often with skill, but toward the end especially, the story feels contrived and resolutions too neat. It doesn’t help that the novel has one or two superfluous subplots.

But to give The Summer Before the War the credit it deserves, Simonson has a knack for social conflict, and she portrays the pecking order of Rye with wit and verve. The never-ending battle against small-mindedness, gossips, sexism, and class snobbery consumes much energy in these pages, and the repartée between Hugh and his rakish cousin, Daniel, makes fun reading. (It’s a bit surprising how neither young man seems to have a home other than that of their aunt and uncle, but I’m glad they don’t.)

Rye Grammar School, which last held classes in 1907, as it appeared in 2010 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Beatrice’s struggles are more compelling. She has to play the upright spinster so that the school worthies will hire her, because only a young woman of irreproachable character may come in contact with impressionable youth. Meanwhile, of course, said worthies have nothing but contempt for these lower-class children and would never lift a finger to help them, whereas Beatrice actually believes she can bring light into their lives. Further, having catered to a domineering, scholarly father who has recently died, Beatrice should, in theory, have her meager inheritance, but (male) trustees prevent her from touching it. They, and others, assume that a “girl” of twenty-three can’t be independent without losing her virtue, a criticism that extends to her desire to write books. These are the parts of The Summer Before the War that I like best.

But I like the humor too. Consider this description of an oak-paneled anteroom:

. . . between two large windows, an imposing, green malachite bust of Cromwell on a matching plinth so floridly carved with vines and flowers that Cromwell himself would surely have had it destroyed. Hugh was not familiar with any connection of the Earl North family to Cromwell. Perhaps, he thought, there was none and that was why the ugly heirloom had been consigned to oaken purgatory to intimidate unwanted guests.

The Summer Before the War unfolds at a leisurely pace, for the most part. I don’t mind that, and I regret that so few authors these days tell stories that way; they probably figure their readers won’t have the patience. They may be right, but I don’t think length is the problem. It’s depth. We That Are Left and A Gentleman in Moscow, for instance, succeed by showing their characters’ inner lives so thoroughly that I don’t care how many pages go by. Conversely, when Simonson narrates an intricate story with half-full characters whose inner lives she tells in shorthand (“he felt such-and-such”), that’s when I become conscious of page numbers.

I don’t mean to blame Simonson or single her out; I happened to read her at a moment when I’m redefining my standards. Many, if not most, novelists follow some version of what she does, which for me these days means that I can borrow a stack of promising books from the library and find only one or two that intrigue me past the opening pages. The Summer Before the War would have pleased me more had the author plumbed her main subject and characters to the greater depth.

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

Who Owns a Dead Writer?: Max Gate

19 Monday Jun 2017

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Review: Max Gate, by Damien Wilkins
Aardvark Bureau, 2016. 223 pp. $15

It’s 1928, and Thomas Hardy lies dying at his home, Max Gate, in Wessex. This may strike you as a pretty thin premise for a novel, even one as short as this. And if you’re like me and think that Jude the Obscure and Return of the Native are dreary, ponderous sermons, you might have decidedly mixed feelings about the key event in the story.

Max Gate, Thomas Hardy’s home from 1885 until 1928, as it appeared in 2015 (courtesy DeFacto, via Wikimedia Commons)

But never fear. Though much beloved in his household, the failing Mr. Hardy has also evoked less exalted sentiments, even from people who’ve never read him. More importantly, Wilkins has crafted a subtle, insightful exploration of fame–what it means, how people behave in its presence, and who winds up paying the price. And who better to recount the conflicts over divided loyalties and greed than a trusted housemaid? Nellie Titterington respects the dying man, but she feels greater empathy for his put-upon wife, Florence, to whom she’s often a confidante. However, that doesn’t prevent Nellie from seeing and recounting the foibles (and worse) of Mrs. F., as she calls her; the other residents of Max Gate, including the dog, Wessex; and visitors eager to profit from the writer’s passing while calling their interest something else.

Nellie’s voice, clever, lucid, and occasionally ribald, makes a boon companion in a story like this. She narrates in retrospect, but Wilkins handles this perspective wisely and unobtrusively. The essential action occurs over a very few days, without a prologue or jarring shifts in time, and with minimal yet sufficient backstory. Better still, he uses Nellie’s retrospection to make a key point. Unlike other characters in the novel, she refuses to think of these few days as the most significant time of her life, and in later years, she neither volunteers nor denies having witnessed them. To her, becoming a teacher, marrying when she thought she had no chance of it, and raising a daughter matter much more–and no one at Max Gate ever learns of these events. It’s a refreshing comment on the human desire to bask in limelight of whatever source, when true happiness comes from a life well lived.

What’s more, though Nellie grants that Hardy’s a great writer, he’s not a great man, she says; he’s selfish, thoughtless of others, gruff, and not especially brave. No one bears the brunt more than Florence, his second wife, who believes that he noticed whenever she wasn’t there but never longed for her return. Her advisers, whether from blindness or self-interest, assure her after Hardy’s death that she must be wrong, that he loved and cherished her. But they’re so quick to press her about their pet projects, that you have to wonder whether they see her any more clearly than her late husband. Let’s push to have Tom buried at Westminster Abbey, they urge, despite the dead man’s express wish to lie in Wessex. Florence, have you thought about his collected papers?

Then there’s the local reporter, Alex, who never lets decency or common sense prevent him from asking intrusive questions, and who quotes passages from Hardy’s work as evidence that he, Alex, deserves more consideration than the man from The Times. Alex also carries on a flirtation with Nellie, who eventually realizes that he’s untrue to her:

His nose is red from the cold, a detail I’m meanly glad to see since it makes Alex look a bit silly. We haven’t spoken since the day I saw him in town with a woman who wasn’t me, and I walked up to them, as if under a drug, and said words that really felt as if they were attached to a piece of string and I was some magician making an impossible length of choking material emerge from my mouth. Silk.

So Nellie is definitely someone who can stick up for herself–in contrast to Florence–and the reader is left to decide whether Alex actually likes her or is simply trying to get an ally inside Max Gate. Nellie also knows how to laugh, and I did too; for example, at the story about the dog walking the length of a table to eat the meat off Lady Fitzgerald’s fork.

Max Gate moves briskly and is no longer than it needs to be. I sometimes wondered why a few random paragraphs appeared at the start of certain sections, usually literary ramblings or anecdotes. Some were clever, some opaque. But Max Gate is a witty, winning book.

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

Eccentrics at Love and War: The Dust That Falls from Dreams

23 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: The Dust That Falls from Dreams, by Louis de Bernières
Pantheon, 2015. 511 pp. $28

To his 1939 comic drama The Time of Your Life, William Saroyan added an end note, as if he worried that his audience would miss his all-too-obvious theme: “In the time of your life, live. . . . Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed.”

The Dust That Falls from Dreams reminds me of Saroyan, providing a cast of (mostly) lovable and often hilarious eccentrics. Whether they realize it or not–and someone will eventually tell them–they’re searching for goodness everywhere, which they manage to find with surprising frequency. In other words, The Dust That Falls from Dreams bears only a passing resemblance to real life, though de Bernières has taken pains to re-create the Edwardian era and the First World War in precise detail. What matters most, he plumbs his characters’ inner lives. The apparent divide between the scrupulously accurate everyday and the fairy-dust plot is at once the novel’s charm and chief drawback; the earnestness with which de Bernières tells his tale fails to persuade me that his characters are plausible, much as I’d like to meet them.

 

A fashion plate from 1909 shows well-dressed ladies in front of Harrod's (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

A fashion plate from 1909 shows well-dressed ladies in front of Harrod’s (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

That said, it would be churlish to dismiss The Dust That Falls from Dreams as mere fluff, and even if it were only that, it’s a lot of fun. The premise, loose as it is, supposes that the children of three neighboring families in the countryside south of London have formed such a strong attachment that even the First World War can’t shake it–if anything, the bonds become stronger. How that happens, and what tragedies get in the way, make for a wide-ranging narrative that explores social class, love, sex, religious faith, valor, family relations, and a once-established morality uprooted by war. The chapters are short and episodic, a format I dislike, yet de Bernières usually succeeds with it, because his characters carry the day.

There’s Hamilton McCosh, father of four daughters and husband to Mrs. McCosh, a vicious snob, bigot, and altogether impossible woman. “What mortification and inconvenience it was to live in such terror of one’s wife,” he muses, “and to be obliged to stand up to her so often.” The only way he (or anyone else) can get around her is by telling her that a royal personage or duchess has endorsed a particular activity or behavior, in which case it passes muster. Mr. McCosh survives by playing golf, inventing gadgets, and keeping mistresses (though these are hardly mentioned and don’t figure in the story). The four daughters–Rosie, Christabel, Ottilie, and Sophie–are each irrepressible; my favorite is Sophie, whose malapropisms send everyone, this reader included, into hysterical laughter.

De Bernières takes you into all manner of nooks and crannies, whether how to fly a Sopwith Camel, what it was like to clean and maintain an Edwardian house, attend a séance, or talk philosophy with Bertrand Russell during a chance meeting on a train. You also learn what it was like to live and die in the trenches in 1915 or work in a hospital tending the wounded. But the narrative seldom shows the fighting or the chaos of triage as the stretchers are unloaded, only their aftermath, usually recounted by a witness or participant. I believe this is a conscious choice, and that de Bernières wants the reader to focus on the aftermath and effects, described with an eye to the individual, the peculiar, because it’s individuals who matter above all to him.

Where The Dust That Falls from Dreams rubs me wrong lies with Mrs. McCosh and her eldest, Rosie. Mama McCosh abuses people right and left, almost all of whom rush to excuse her. She’s maddeningly funny in her ridiculous social prejudices, but she also causes immense damage. I get that The Dust That Falls from Dreams is about the milk of human kindness, but the narrative squares up to other cruelties without making excuses for them. She, however, gets a pass.

I find Rosie irritating for similar reasons; priggish self-denial is seldom interesting, and she won’t let herself dream of what she’s missing, which makes her even duller. She remains fixated on her fiancé, killed in battle, in a plodding mysticism that surpasses understanding, and her sense of duty threatens to strangle her and everyone else. Since the fiancé was a well-liked, kind, noble-hearted romantic of no particular accomplishment or talent–a beloved nonentity, if you will–I suppose that de Bernières is trying to use the pair to represent the Edwardian age, golden but doomed, irretrievable. But Rosie’s obstinacy, which forbids even any mention of what’s happening, can be tiresome.

Consequently, I think The Dust That Falls from Dreams succeeds best as a discursive, sometimes antic take on its subject that delivers its most serious impact when, paradoxically, it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

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