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Star-Crossed Love: The Glittering Hour

13 Monday Sep 2021

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Review: The Glittering Hour, by Iona Grey
St. Martins, 2019. 468 pp. $29

It’s January 1936, and nine-year-old Alice Carew misses her mother terribly. Mama’s away in Burma with Papa, who has mining interests there, and the family’s Wiltshire estate, Blackwood, feels like a prison to Alice. An artistically precocious child with no head for or interest in reading or mathematics, Alice has no allies in the house save her beloved nanny, Polly, who can’t protect her from Grandmama, as starchy and cold an aristocrat as ever graced England’s shores.

The old lady has never liked her grandchild, censors the girl’s letters to her parents, and even denies Alice the colored pencils Mama bought for her. Good grief. Yet despite her grandmother’s and father’s opinion that Alice has a second-rate mind, the girl sees plenty, including their lack of love for her — but not the reason for it. Therein hangs a tale.

However, all this is prologue to Mama’s back story. Selina Carew, née Lennox, was a Bright Young Thing in the Twenties who burned the candle at both ends. With a passion for expensive amusements and a horror of boredom, Selina and her blue-blood friends cut a swath through London at breakneck speed, awash in champagne and jewels, tossing out arch bon mots and trying to decide whether this or that costume party or dance will be too unbearable; really, isn’t there anything better to do? To her family’s horror, the scandal sheets eat this up, from which Selina derives some satisfaction.

Selina’s no airhead (though I reserve judgment on her friends), because if she were, The Glittering Hour would have a flat, spoiled-brat heroine and require a seismic change from her that would strain credulity. Rather, she has deep conflicts, from which she’s trying to hide. She represents the upper-class cohort that survived the Great War and who dash from party to party so as to conceal the pain of loss. But Selina feels it, can’t help it; like so many women of all social classes, she lost a beloved brother at Passchendaele. What’s more, much as it hurts, she refuses to believe that all joy must end, though admittedly, she overdoes it. Worse, none of that may be spoken of:

Seven years on from the armistice and the scars of the war were still visible everywhere. One got adept at looking past them, or through them, or pretending they weren’t there at all. One got on with things in the best way one could; there was always someone worse off, like the man selling matches, or Lady Renshaw, who had lost all three of her boys… One could never complain about one’s own loss. Selina understood why her mother had buried hers in the deepest recesses of her heart and hardened her face against the world. It was her way of coping, of Getting On. But it was a sad legacy for a boy whose smile could light up a room.

Selina meets Lawrence Weston, an artist who makes his living painting portraits based on photographs for war-bereaved families, but whose real passion is photography — which few people consider an art form. Little do they know. For extra money, Lawrence takes pictures of the rich and famous making public nuisances of themselves — he knows about Selina Lennox before they meet — but he prefers photographing miners, the men selling matches, whatever social commentary his lens seeks out.

William Monk’s 1920 engraving of the Cenotaph in Whitehall, a memorial to the war dead. The wooden structure was later replaced in stone (courtesy http://www.abbottandholder-thelist.co.uk/ via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I understand what Grey’s trying to achieve by starting with Alice, but that approach has its flaws. Though Alice’s predicament squeezes my heart, as it’s meant to, that’s not where the richest material lies. I prefer Selina’s inner struggle as a Bright Young Thing and her relationship to Lawrence, which has so many social markers, the pair might even inhale and exhale differently, for all I know. The class barrier to romance is hardly new, but Grey’s rendering takes on particularity, because she grounds it so thoroughly in active physical detail. It’s not just Lawrence’s shabby clothes or Selina’s accent that set them apart, though those matter and are what onlookers see and hear; it’s how the physical details reveal these two characters’ different worldviews.

On the minus side, the story hinges on two secrets, neither of which is particularly hard to discern, and the narrative has its melodramatic moments, especially toward the end. I wish Grey didn’t resort to telling, rather than showing, emotions in certain key moments— what a shame, for such an astute observer — and the resulting shorthand phrases sometimes go thump. Further, though Grandmama’s portrayal will curdle your blood, she’s that real, Alice’s father seems like a shirt stuffed with papier-mâché.

Even so, The Glittering Hour finds something new to say about the decade after the Great War, and Selina and Lawrence are appealing characters. It’s worth reading for that, if not for more.

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

The Marsh Girl: Where the Crawdads Sing

11 Monday Jan 2021

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Review: Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
Putnam, 2018. 368 pp. $28

Six-year-old Kya doesn’t know her real name is Catherine, nor has she ever been to school. All she knows is the South Carolina marsh where she lives with several siblings, a drunken, violent father, and a much put-upon mother. But in summer 1952, Ma walks out, after which Kya’s brothers and sisters follow. Little Kya has to raise herself, essentially, because her father’s often absent on a bender, which can be a blessing. Her only friends are wild creatures, whose habits she comes to know intimately; her greatest, sole pleasure.

You see the wild creatures she loves, rendered with insight and deep feeling:

A great blue heron is the color of gray mist reflecting in blue water. And like the mist, she can fade into the backdrop, all of her disappearing except the concentric circles of her lock-and-load eyes. She is a patient, solitary hunter, standing alone as long as it takes her to snatch her prey. Or, eyeing her catch, she will stride forward one slow step at a time, like a predacious bridesmaid. And yet, on rare occasions she hunts on the wing, darting and diving sharply, swordlike beak in the lead.

Kya herself might answer to this description, especially that of the “patient, solitary hunter.” The vivid portrait of nature in a place nobody else wants, whose human inhabitants the inlanders consider trash, provides a superb background. And the tale of how this girl grows up by her own wits (and kindness of strangers), terrified of just about everybody and everything except the marsh, makes remarkable reading.

However, Where the Crawdads Sing doesn’t settle for the unusual coming-of-age story, and therein rests its greatest shortcoming. Jumping ahead to 1969, as many of these short chapters do, there’s a mystery as well. A former high school quarterback, the town Lothario, is found dead in the marsh. You guess right away that the police, utterly incompetent and desperate to find a murderer (they refuse to accept that such a demigod could have died accidentally), will home in on the Marsh Girl, what the locals call her. She’s reputed savage, lustful, and depraved, the townsfolk’s way saying that she’s different from them, therefore expendable.

The All-Star Bowling Alley, Orangeburg, South Carolina, pictured in 2015. In February 1968, police opened fire on Black students protesting the alley’s segregation policy at the time. Three students were killed and dozens injured. (Courtesy Ammodramus, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Granted, the southern-justice narrative provides an instantly recognizable means to raise the stakes. But Owens introduces the death in a prologue and keeps the police procedure front and center, as if the mind-boggling story of a little girl in a marsh weren’t enough. As years pass, there’s also a tender romance with a young man who accepts Kya as she is. I’d have thought all that sufficient and quite lovely, so I ask why we need the mystery. I will say that the murder investigation allows Owens to expound, sometimes cogently, on mating habits and the genetics of survival, linking her protagonist’s story to evolution, a clever conceit.

But much of the novel feels contrived. I never sense that Kya, who undergoes great hardship and takes brutal, yet often predictable, knocks, is ever really in danger. Terrible things happen, but just as the marsh protects her from outsiders who don’t know its waterways or approaches, the narrative cocoons her, in a way.

Start with how a child grows to her twenties in perfect health, without ever having seen a doctor or dentist. But if that sounds like nitpicking, consider the split time frame, which puts you in 1969 right away, undermining the tensions of 1952 and the immediate years afterward. Also, the kind strangers often appear at just the right moment, sometimes bearing a bounty too good to be true. After a while, I get the idea that whatever trouble comes her way, luck will favor her.

Further, Kya’s voice goes all over the map, which jars me and pulls me out of the story. Owens seems eager to get to the age where Kya speaks and thinks like an autodidact biologist offering thoughtful commentary about evolution (itself a stretch), rather than stay with the bewildered, frightened child who doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from, or how to prepare it. Since I want to hear the child and don’t always believe the self-trained scientist, the struggle between the voices is very distracting, especially when one intrudes on the other. The paragraph quoted above, about the heron, supplies an example; Kya wouldn’t know what “concentric circles” means, let alone “bridesmaid” or “lock-and-load.” So who’s watching the heron?

Finally, the year 1969 witnessed turmoil and great events, but I don’t recognize them here, or little about the Sixties, for that matter. The Vietnam War barely makes an appearance, and though Jim Crow seeps around the edges, it’s as if Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement had gone unheard of in South Carolina. Moon landing? Nary a mention, even among the inlanders.

Despite a terrific premise and beautiful prose, Where the Crawdads Sing is one of those novels that would have appealed to me more had the author crammed less in it.

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

As the Losses Mount: Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

29 Monday Aug 2016

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Review: Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, by Chris Cleave
Simon & Schuster, 2016. 424 pp. $27

This novel is hardly the first about a love triangle in wartime, but if it’s not the best of the genre in recent memory, it’s pretty damn close.

Mary North, a young woman at odds with her stuffy London family, hastens home from a Swiss finishing school in September 1939, just after Britain declares war. She wants to “do something,” so she badgers the War Office, assuming that her services must be required, maybe as a secret agent. After all, her father’s an MP, perhaps destined for a cabinet post, so why not? Nobody really knows what the war will be like, but eighteen-year-old Mary is very sure that for her, it will involve duty, freedom, and a ripping lark. In other words, Mary has the makings of an absolutely insufferable, overprivileged twit–and yet she’s quite the opposite.

 

Bomb damage in Valletta, Malta, May 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Bomb damage in Valletta, Malta, May 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Two traits save her, in my eyes. First, she’s delightfully subversive, willing to challenge commonly held beliefs in herself and others, and does so with wit and style. Second, she tries to live by her discoveries, working around the rules whenever necessary–a free spirit who becomes increasingly aware how much her ability to be one derives from her wealth and social position.

Mary finds a job as a teacher, where her readiness to see things from the children’s point of view makes her an asset. For instance, the day they’re to be evacuated from London (a war measure), her charges exchange their name tags the moment she turns her back. Being who she is, she pretends that their new names are the correct ones, which amuses them no end. “It turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.” But Mary’s superiors think she’s unfit to teach–too much levity and sympathy, flouting the rules–so they fire her.

Are we downhearted? Only for a moment. Mary lobbies Tom Shaw, an administrator who grants her the use of an abandoned school, where she plans to teach those children shunted back from the countryside, spurned because of their skin color, emotional disabilities, or neediness. Mary throws herself into rescuing these kids and, shortly afterward, into Tom’s arms as well.

Meanwhile, however, Tom’s good friend Alistair, an officer who barely survived the Battle of France and was evacuated from Dunkirk, has come home to London on leave. (Notice the recurring theme of evacuation and rescue, and who deserves it, or doesn’t.) By happenstance, the day Alistair ships out again, Mary brings him his duffel bag at the train station. Cleave, in the simple, elegant prose that makes this novel shine, describes the feeling between them:

She laughed then, brightly and without complication, and he laughed too, and for a moment the war with its lachrymose smoke was blown away on a bright, clean wind. Alistair marveled that she could do such a thing with the tiniest inflection of her mouth and the lightest look in her eye: even exhausted, in yesterday’s dress with her hair disheveled, she could make the distance between them disappear.

Consequently, it’s no secret that while enduring the terrible, grinding, years-long siege of Malta, Alistair thinks of Mary and his friend Tom in different, not always selfless, ways. What eventually happens is anything but predictable, even if it seems so at first, because Cleave is master of my favorite literary device, the “no; and furthermore.” Just when you think things are settled, they’re not–they get even worse–and no one’s off the hook. Some readers may object to the unflinching nature of the narrative, which deals out plenty of pain and leaves quite a few prejudices intact. But I urge you to read Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, precisely because these characters earn every drop of joy they get. Along the way, Cleave treats you to terrific dialogue, much of it darkly funny, and pitch-perfect descriptions of new love, intense desperation, and loss. The characterizations feel true in every respect, save one (I don’t believe that Mary’s only eighteen at the novel’s beginning, and she doesn’t act like the virgin she’s supposed to be).

I’ve heard some people call this book same-old, same-old, or too sentimental. Don’t believe them. Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is a wrenching novel, one of the finest I’ve read this year.

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

Everybody’s Guilty: The Sympathizer

25 Monday Jan 2016

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Review: The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove/Atlantic, 2015. 371 pp. $26

“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” the narrator known only as the Captain declares in this novel’s first line, also the start of his “confession.” And what a harrowing, painful outpouring he commits to paper in what appears to be solitary confinement, inflicted by captors at first unidentified. He tells of being born illegitimate in North Vietnam, of half-European parentage, and the vicious prejudice that pursues him as a result. His only consolations are the unwavering love of a mother who died young, and two longtime friends whose loyalty sustains him and for whom he would lay down his life. He talks about his education in the United States, and his attraction for aspects of American culture, not least its freer sexual mores. But mostly, he recounts what he did–or failed to do–as a Communist mole within the South Vietnamese intelligence service, a riveting-to-the-eyeballs tale of crimes he committed to protect his secret identity, trying desperately to play both sides. Accordingly, he knows more than he cares to about murder, rape, treachery, napalm, torture, racism, and hypocrisy, and he delivers much of his story with brilliant observations that are often howlingly funny in a raw, dark way.

Operation Frequent Wind, 29 April 1975. As Saigon fell, some Vietnamese civilians were evacuated to U.S. Navy vessels, as here, and granted asylum (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via U.S. Marines; public domain)

Operation Frequent Wind, 29 April 1975. As Saigon fell, some Vietnamese civilians were evacuated to U.S. Navy vessels, as here, and granted asylum (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via U.S. Marines; public domain).

“What was it like,” he asks rhetorically, “to live in a time when one’s fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one’s country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?” Much as he admires American culture, he deflates our “Disneyland ideology of happiness,” our pretense of eternal innocence no matter how many times we’ve lost it in dirty wars or tricks, “citizens of a democracy destroying another country in order to save it.” And when you pretend innocence, you can believe that anything you do is just, whereas, “at least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do.”

Not that the South Vietnamese government is any better. The General, under whom the Captain serves, is a gifted, patriotic leader who pays lip service to moral assumptions only so long as they prop up his power and self-image. He’s seen everything, learned nothing. Ditto the Communists, who think life is a science determined by historical axioms, and who have no use for love, except for the teachings of Marx and Mao, which the Captain has hardly studied–they’ve no feeling to them. “How could I forget,” he remarks toward the end, “that every truth meant at least two things, that slogans were the empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea?” Most particularly, he deplores the cold sexlessness to which communism aspires, “the belief that every comrade is supposed to behave like a noble peasant whose hard hoe is devoted only to farming.”

Consequently, the Captain belongs nowhere, and it’s his ability to see everything from the outside–his sole talent, he thinks–that only worsens his sense of isolation. But it does make for terrific satire. He meets a right-wing congressman, a filmmaker, a professor of Asian studies, and skewers them all, without ever claiming to be superior. The Captain’s flaws are front and center, in fact, to the point that the sympathizer can be hard to sympathize with.

This novel is very disturbing, and some readers may shy away because of it. In particular, the graphic violence can be hard to take. But if you can, give it a try. Such grisliness often puts me off, but the subject here matters to me. I came of age during the Vietnam War, which left a deep impression, and about which I’ve read many fine books. To me, this one surpasses them all–for its unsparing honesty, insight, breadth, and vivid prose. What’s more, it’s even a first novel, further proof to a fellow author that life just isn’t fair.

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

Eighteenth-Century Iconoclast: Ross Poldark

07 Monday Dec 2015

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Review: Ross Poldark, a Novel of Cornwall, 1783-1787, by Winston Graham
Sourcebooks, 2009 [1945]. 314 pp. $17

Captain Ross Poldark returns to Cornwall from the American war to find that everything has gone to pieces. His father has died, leaving behind debts. The two servants tasked with keeping up the modest ancestral home and surrounding farmlands have let them go to ruin and sold off the livestock to keep themselves soused. Worst of all, though, Ross’s sweetheart, the beautiful Elizabeth, is shortly to marry his friend and cousin, Francis.

Beach in Cornwall (Courtesy Mike Coates, publicdomainpictures.net)

Beach in Cornwall (Courtesy Mike Coates, publicdomainpictures.net)

To say that this novel is about a man who overcomes pain and disappointment to put his life back together is like saying that Huckleberry Finn is about a boy on a raft. Ross indeed has plenty of reconstruction to do and ways of submerging (but not drowning) his sorrows. However, it’s how and why he goes about rebuilding his life, who helps or hinders him, and how everyone else feels about it that make Ross Poldark a marvelously entertaining story. Further, the novel also offers a finely detailed picture of eighteenth-century England, warts and all.

That’s because Ross, though a man of his time, has no use for conventions, institutions, or prejudices that unjustly protect his social class at others’ expense. Whether his years among American revolutionaries influenced his views, or his youthful, independent cast of mind has flowered in adulthood, Ross repeatedly dares gossip and ostracism to do what he thinks is right. He has his limits, of course, believing in social distinctions. And to avoid making enemies, he sometimes takes the middle road, only to learn that he can’t please anybody.

Nevertheless, seemingly with every action he takes, problems occur, and he rises to meet them, revealing conflicts within himself and with the society in which he lives. Even so simple an exercise as dancing with a young girl to let her feel that she’s not a wallflower has far-reaching complications because of the way girls are treated like marriageable chattel. Defending a cottager from poaching charges sets Ross against the local magistracy while putting class and social inequities on hideous display. Restarting an old copper mine touches on ills of the Industrial Revolution and the constant struggle for a living wage.

But nothing arouses as much gossip or spite from the community, or ambivalence within Ross himself, as his rescue of Demelza Carne. Ross first sees the twelve-year-old Demelza at a fair, where she tries to rescue her dog from being tortured by a pack of boys, only to be set upon herself. Ross wonders why she’d go to that length for a mere animal–another common eighteenth-century English attitude–but when he sees the welts and bruises that her father has inflicted on her, he resolves to hire her as a live-in maid. He knows what people will say, but the more they say it, the less he’s willing to listen.

Wise choice. Once Demelza emerges from beneath her miserable childhood and realizes she can be a real person, she seizes the chance with both hands, changing the Poldark residence in the process. Over time, her vivacity, directness, and ability to see to the heart of things make her formidable indeed, and her way of putting things can only be described as delicious. She’s no prodigy–in this, Graham has wielded a lighter hand than many novelists I could name–but she has considerable resources that not even she’s aware of. In brief, she’s a firecracker, if a subservient one–for now.

Ross Poldark is the first of eleven volumes, which, I’m told, became a British television series, aired on PBS. I consider myself lucky that I never saw it, because I can appreciate this wonderful novel with fresh eyes.

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