Tag Archives: coming-of-age story

Music, Death, Grief: The Great Passion

23 Monday Jan 2023

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Review: The Great Passion, by James Runcie
Bloomsbury, 2022. 272 pp. $28

Bad enough that thirteen-year-old Stefan Silbermann’s mother has just died. His father, a well-known organ maker, insists that the boy spend a year at music school far from home, in Leipzig, as part of training in the family business.

The year is 1726, and eighteenth-century Leipzig seems a place where people take their Lutheranism neat, forever thinking about death, expecting to suffer, and—among the strictest believers—ready to condemn others for vivacity. Stefan’s school, run by clerics, fits this self-denying mold. But Stefan, though a grieving, serious child, has more to him. The rector seems to want to beat whatever that is out of him—and his classmates, who already pick on the new boy, seize their chance to persecute him even further.

But the saving grace to this school is its choral music director, or cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach. He hears Stefan’s soprano, as yet unbroken, and sweeps him into his house, where the boy must practice music constantly but also has the chance to escape his anxieties and grief a few hours at a time. The cantor, though a hard man to please, understands something of what the boy is going through, since he himself lost his beloved first wife several years before.

Elias Gottlob Haussmann’s portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, 1748 ( courtesy Bach-Archiv, Leipzig via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Also, since the cantor writes a cantata every week, to be performed at Sunday services, Stefan learns to sing music he believes too difficult for him, and to play keyboard better than he’d ever dreamed possible. The downside, of course, is that the school bullies resent him all the more for being the cantor’s favorite, especially since he’s displaced one of his chief tormentors in that role.

Bach’s legendary large family figures here, including his second wife, Anna Magdalena, as sweet and sensitive as her husband is brusque and self-centered. She becomes a kind of surrogate mother for Stefan, though he knows he’s not part of the family. More importantly, there’s seventeen-year-old Catharina, Bach’s daughter by his late wife, with whom Stefan strikes up a close friendship, not least because they each have a lost a mother. As you might expect, he comes to feel something more for her.

The Great Passion has much to say about mourning and faith, life and death, and music as a medium to express feelings about them—as well as the joy that seems so fleeting. Runcie, whose father was Archbishop of Canterbury, knows these themes inside out. I can’t help wonder too whether Stefan’s sadistic, competitive schoolmates derive from models in English public schools.

People have wondered for centuries how Bach managed to write so much music. This book gives a hint. The man never stops thinking about music, and he permits nobody at home to be idle. One child or other is always playing an instrument. They’re used to this constant practice, but Stefan isn’t; if he’s not singing or playing the clavichord, he’s copying scores for the cantor.

I like the characterizations, not just of the principals, but, for instance, of Georg Philipp Telemann, who makes Bach look like a humble wallflower. I also like the kind oboist who takes an interest in Stefan and tries to shield him from the school’s brutalities. The description of this man typifies the narrative style:

The man was as long and as thin as one of his instruments. The buttons and fastenings on his spinach-green coat and jacket were the keys on the barrel of his body, although he seemed to take better care of his oboes than he did of his own health. When he leaned forward to light his pipe, he was so slender he looked like a human candle that was about to set fire to itself.

From time to time, Runcie uses his sharp prose to comment pithily on the human condition. Bach loves to sound off in impromptu sermons, a habit Anna Magdalena warns him about, but which often contain nuggets of wisdom. Stefan laments the human habit of summing up others in a phrase and never seeing past that capsule description, therefore never knowing another person, really. And the oboist urges Stefan to “take the music as quickly as you dare. There’s no point in playing a piece if it only needs to be obeyed.” I think that’s also true of writing; master the words, don’t let them master you.

The dreary, death-obsessed, stiff-necked Leipzigers who make others miserable, probably because they are themselves, are properly off-putting but likely true to time and place. The musicians, who share the same religious beliefs yet strive to create beauty in God’s service, come across vividly. Though I know nothing about choral music and have different ideas about religious faith, I enjoyed The Great Passion very much and highly recommend it.

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

Fit to Print?: Gutenberg’s Apprentice

05 Monday Dec 2022

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Review: Gutenberg’s Apprentice, by Alix Christie
Harper, 2014. 401 pp. $28

Peter Schoeffer, scribe, thinks he has it made. He loves Paris, his adopted city, where the Seine smells “of chalk and stone, a sharp and thrilling city thriving.” At twenty-five, he sees a path upward, because the Church will pay for manuscripts penned in a fine hand such as his.

But in September 1450, his stepfather, a wealthy merchant and bookseller, summons him home to Mainz without saying why, and you sense Peter’s resentment at the peremptory recall.

The reason makes Peter feel even worse. He’s to accept an apprenticeship—at his age, with his accomplishments!—to aid an effort that feels both socially beneath him and blasphemous. But he can’t say no, because stepdad has raised him, educated him, and made him who he is. But to be shackled to a stinking, cellar workshop and its forge alongside half-educated smiths offends his pride and aesthetic soul. He’s also uncertain where he belongs socially, so he’s free to resent those above and below him.

Fifteenth-century illustration of Peter Schoeffer, artist unknown (Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Furthermore, and most important, his new master is Johann Gensfleisch, known as Gutenberg, who’s undertaken a sacrilegious project out of arrogant greed—to produce scores of books at once, selling holy texts for profit. No wonder that everyone’s sworn to secrecy, for if the Church found out, they’d seize everything and have the printers arrested.

Not just that; Gutenberg represents all that Peter has learned to detest. The master belongs to Mainz’s upper crust, called Elders, one of the thirty leading families who treat the city like a fiefdom. The Elders act hand-in-glove with the archbishop to bleed the merchants, guilds, and less exalted citizens for their own gain.

Consequently, that Peter’s stepfather has chosen to bankroll Gutenberg seems corrupt, and his own presence designed to keep an eye on stepdad’s investment—until the young scribe realizes how ruthless, manipulative, and controlling his new master is. Maybe Peter’s there as Gutenberg’s pawn against his chief creditor. In any case, Peter feels like a slave, with no respite from either quarter.

Even so, he admires artistic talent, and Gutenberg never lets anyone forget he’s a genius. Christie has done a terrific job rendering the era, the political machinations, and the process of printing as its inventors devise it on the fly. Most of her characters are historical figures, including Peter, and she reimagines them with flair and attention to detail. The scenes of fashioning, failure, and gradual surmounting of obstacles are as gripping as any; I never appreciated how difficult or painstaking it was to print a book in the fifteenth century, or how many years it took.

Peter’s coming-of-age story, in which his growing technical skill and innovative sense mirror his emotional maturation, works nicely. He also comes to terms with his religious objections to the project, gradually understanding that the Church’s presumed opposition derives partly from its role as sole representative of God on earth, so its guardianship of scribes has both economic and political significance. Reproduce religious texts that any literate person can read, and the printer not only makes scribes superfluous, individual people can seek God for themselves, a gauntlet thrown down to church power. Accordingly, this narrative foreshadows the Reformation, mere decades away.

At its best, Gutenberg’s Apprentice reads like a thriller. Tension arises from the need for secrecy, compromised by the length of time the project takes, the ever-increasing number of participants, and Gutenberg’s indiscretions—he’s constantly cutting deals with clerics and merchants, infuriating Peter’s stepfather and squeezing the young man between two powerful men he’s doomed to displease. Throughout, Christie captures the mindset, the strivings, and the fixation on social class, as with this description of a scriptorium where monks gather to write:

The faces were all known to him—in the way that any face, in a place as small as Mainz, was known. They didn’t change: the jowls just spread, the noses grew redder and more bulbous. Elders all, patricians from the city or the minor nobles from the land: the clergy was made up of second sons from wealthy families, stashed and suckled by the Mother Church for life. . .He was a stranger, with a stranger’s anonymity, which brought both freedom and a certain risk.

In such a complicated narrative, it’s not always easy to penetrate the politics, despite Christie’s gift for depicting the power struggles. I’m also not persuaded, in a couple instances, that Peter would either forgive his stepfather his hard hand or feel warmly toward him; these crucial transitions seem rushed or simple.

But overall, Gutenberg’s Apprentice does what excellent historical fiction should do, and I highly recommend it.

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

Manipulated and Discarded: The Peculiarities

18 Monday Apr 2022

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Review: The Peculiarities, by David Liss
Tachyon, 2021. 325 pp. $18

London, 1899. Thomas Thresher, twenty-three, nominal scion of the noted banking family of that name, should consider himself fortunate, with a bright future to look forward to. But Thomas feels no hope for anything, present or future. His cruel, tyrannical brother, Walter, the bank’s governor, insists that Thomas serve as a clerk, performing pointless tasks, from which he learns nothing, nor is he meant to, a Dickensian touch. Further, Walter demands that he marry a young woman he’s never seen — a Jewess, no less, an idea that repels him.

But Thomas finds it hard to feel sorry for himself, or to feel much of anything, because Walter has manipulated him all his life and discarded him as worthless — except to do his bidding, as with the strange marriage, for no reason Thomas can fathom. He’s allowed no will or character of his own, and you can see the effects.

What’s more, London itself has changed. Violent fogs that slither like giant, amorphous reptiles bludgeon people to death. Thomas has seen this, but there are other horrors he’s only read about:

The more lurid newspapers published stories of vampires and werewolves, of women giving birth to rabbits, and houses rendered uninhabitable by ghosts. He has read of people possessed by spirits and living men whose own spirits have become trapped in horses, in furnishings, in articles of clothing. There are horrible transformations and mutilations. Things that should not be, if these stories are to be believed, have become not quite commonplace but hardly rare.
Thomas read it all with a fair amount of skepticism until the first leaf sprouted below his right nipple.

These abnormalities and others go by the name of Peculiarities, and in stereotypical British fashion, nobody talks about them. Nobody in polite society, anyway, for the worst afflictions beset the lower classes predominantly, a concept Thomas is loath to accept when his purported fiancée, Esther Feldstein, tells him so.

But you know that Thomas must take her seriously, sooner or later, not least because the bank seems implicated in some way — the impenetrable institution, a Dickensian theme. At the same time, he can accomplish nothing unless he takes himself seriously too, a difficult task when he has been ground under his family’s heel.

His progression makes terrific reading; I’m reminded again of Dickens, say, Pip in Great Expectations. You don’t often see a thriller with such an intricate, forceful character arc, let alone a story that also has enough “no — and furthermore” energy to power a small city. Plenty happens in The Peculiarities, but this is a character-driven novel that explores every emotional transition, and that’s why you care.

Kabbala, a mystical belief system within Judaism, figures in The Peculiarities. Here, a kabbalistic representation of the Tree of Life (courtesy Thomazzo, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The story invokes magic, as you might have guessed, and the plot revolves around the power it confers. But though characters attempt to cast spells, the magic here, as Liss states in the text and repeats in an afterword, doesn’t operate in defiance of natural laws. Rather, it depends on natural laws “previously hidden or generally unknown.” The distinction will become clearer if you read the novel, which I recommend, but I’ll give you one hint. Thomas was on the way toward becoming a first-rate mathematician at Trinity College, Cambridge, until Walter forced him to quit his studies. The skill comes in handy.

Note too the context of the so-called Peculiarities. That the London fog has become deadly violent, instead of the passive killer known to history, suggests environmental disaster writ large. That it attacks poor neighborhoods more often than others reflects a fact reckoned with today but not during the Victorian Age, and that Thomas at first refuses to accept the evidence rings all too true.

How ironic that he’s turning into a tree, as though the forests are taking vengeance for human depredation. And the births of “rabbit children” represent two themes, natal defects from industrial poisons and the attack on reproductive rights. Surely, Liss intends to criticize capitalism in its unbridled state—consider that the central institution here is Thresher’s Bank.

At once a coming-of-age story, a thriller, and historical fantasy, The Peculiarities has much to offer. The plot twists like an eel, sometimes in melodramatic fashion, with one incredible revelation after another. But the prose is beautiful and lucid, and the characters never strike attitudes, as they might in a full-fledged melodrama. Esther proves more than a match for Thomas, one of several friends with whom he never would have bothered had he not been afflicted and chosen to embark on a journey of discovery.

My regular readers know I avoid historical fantasy, but such is my admiration for Liss’s previous books, most notably A Conspiracy of Paper (capitalism, again), that I grabbed this novel off the shelf. The results confirm my trust, and I suspect they will earn yours.

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

Outcast Goddess: Circe

21 Monday Feb 2022

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Review: Circe, by Madeline Miller
Little, Brown, 2018. 385 pp. $28

From the earliest age, the sun god Helios’ youngest daughter fits nowhere and has no friends, only detractors; and are they vicious. Circe is stupid, ugly, awkward, has no common sense, and speaks like a mortal, they say. Like any child, she yearns for some sign, however faint, of paternal affection, but Helios can’t bear the sight of her, and her mother jokes at her expense like everyone else in the sun god’s great hall.

In divine eyes, Circe’s flaw is possessing empathy, for which they have no use and regard as weakness. They weigh every moment, every interaction, as a barometer of who’s got more power, more adoration, and more of whatever admirable trait under discussion, whether physical strength, beauty, or cleverness.

What an exhausting, empty way to live, except that gods don’t live, exactly; they simply exist. And Circe sticks out because she’s dissatisfied with that, and the whole narcissistic one-upmanship game that defines the divine presence. In fact, her first act of rebellion is to offer succor to the suffering Prometheus, an outcast.

When she turns to witchcraft, Helios considers her too dangerous to keep on hand, so he banishes her to an island called Aiaia. In case that’s not in your atlas, just sail north from Scylla and Charybdis, fabled pitfalls from the Odyssey. But Odysseus won’t show up for a while. And before he does, Circe will have her hands full with her older sister, Pasiphaë, who births the Minotaur; Daedalus; and Medea, among others. So the novel offers plenty of action, while portraying its protagonist’s growth from unwanted waif to a power that even Helios and Athena must reckon with.

The measure of this novel is not that Circe comes into her own because she concocts the right potions, though she’s skilled at that. Rather, she grows into herself. I’ve never read a coming-of-age novel that unfolds over centuries, but that’s what Circe is. You can see why teenage girls have embraced this book the way they have; the feminist themes, simple, direct language, and absolute clarity of action and intention may be found in good young adult novels. But I don’t mean to limit Circe’s readership, for Miller has invested her narrative with adult themes and conflicts as well.

Circe and Odysseus, circa 490-480 BCE, National Archaeological Museum, Athens (courtesy Marsyas, via Wikimedia Commons)

For one thing, she grapples with the meaning of life, contrasting it with the immortality that, while attractive, remains unfulfilling precisely because it’s predictable and unchanging. The uncertainty that troubles human dealings is also life’s greatest attribute. Further, Miller delves into issues involving marriage and childrearing — only a parent could have written certain passages — weighing what price each exacts and what benefits each confers. Finally, the author considers the thirst for glory and fame, as exemplified by Odysseus, a brilliantly conceived character:

Moment by moment, his vitality had returned. His eyes were bright now, storm-lit. When he talked, he was lawyer and bard and crossroads charlatan at once, arguing his case, entertaining, pulling back the veil to show you the secrets of the world. It was not just his words, though they were clever enough. It was everything together: his face, his gestures, the sliding tones of his voice. I would say it was like a spell he cast, but there was no spell I knew that could equal it. The gift was his alone.

I confess, I avoided reading Circe because I struggled to get through fifty pages of Miller’s previous novel, The Song of Achilles. But Circe feels like a more confident, deeper, more fully fleshed creation, avoiding the pitfalls that plague lesser retellings of Greek myths that I mentioned last week. Miller knows the myths and culture inside and out, has parsed out every detail of thought, action, and physical setting, and invites you to share that intimacy.

Even so, she never persuades me, even for an instant, that her characters will diverge from the path ordained from them, an illusion I look for and treasure in these retellings, as I also wrote last week. Circe appears to hew pretty closely to the myths I know, though I don’t pretend to be an expert. Also, as I said, the narrative is simple and direct, so, though I see artistry here, I wouldn’t call it subtle. Moreover, it’s an episodic tale rather than a unified story building to a climax, and though the episodes hold my interest and are often tense, as with many biographical novels, I want more cohesion and force.

Nevertheless, Circe is a wonderful book, and I recommend it.

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

What It Means to Be a Woman: Light Changes Everything

16 Monday Mar 2020

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Review: Light Changes Everything, by Nancy E. Turner
St. Martin’s, 2020. 290 pp. $28

Mary Pearl Prine isn’t your average seventeen-year-old. She can ride, shoot, and rope, which, in the Arizona Territory of 1907, would seem pretty usual, except that few other young women of her acquaintance can do likewise, or care to. Mary Pearl can also speak her mind — sometimes — and can draw, which sets her even further apart. What’s more, she dreams of being an artist, and against her mother’s wishes, enrolls in Wheaton College in Chicago to study art.

Just before she leaves, however, Aubrey Hannah, a handsome, moneyed, citified lawyer, proposes marriage. Having read Jane Austen, Mary Pearl has heard that a woman needs a wealthy husband to succeed in life. Though Aubrey’s shotgun approach to betrothal — grab and kiss, importune for the rest — puts her off, she’s physically attracted. Still, she has just enough gumption to ask him, by letter, to wait until she’s finished her two-year course of study.

But college upends Mary Pearl’s world. She’s never before been the butt of snobbish humor for her manners, speech, dress, or frontier skills, which quickly become legend around campus. But she learns valuable lessons about growing up, not least how to exercise her nascent gift for standing up for herself, especially when she feels she’s being treated as a second-class citizen, whether as a Westerner or a woman. Still, though she finds nice dresses and urban conveniences seductive, at root, she suspects the city and its ways:

What a wagonload of nonsense was life in this big city. Not a speck of interest in where their water came from, nor whether there was enough for their neighbors to eat. Just busy with doing things and having things I wouldn’t even know I didn’t have, which included crystal punch bowls and harp lessons.

Turner’s storytelling range in this coming-of-age novel includes betrayal, sexual and armed violence, the pain of longing, and hilarious situations. From the start, you sense Mary Pearl’s spirit and confusion about asserting herself, and I like how the author refuses to let her rush into choices she must make, given the familial and societal pressures she feels as a woman. You also understand where Mary Pearl gets her feminism, from her Aunt Sarah, who’s a real rip, and who can trade fire in words or bullets with anybody, male or female. From her, Mary Pearl has learned she has a place in the world, and she holds that thought tenaciously, even if she can’t always express it to others.

Whether in spoken word or contained thought, however, Mary Pearl’s voice lets fly. When Mama says that only hussies go to college, Mary Pearl reflects on her well-used, hand-me-down clothes, ratty workboots, and ragged sunbonnet, “hardly the picture of a fallen woman, unless a person meant she’d fallen down a mine shaft.” Witnessing her first (and probably last) ballet in Chicago, “it was embarrassing watching all those men and women tromping around in their tightest underwear and spinning and leaping with their legs and arms held out peculiar. I expected any second that someone would split their britches and all kinds of buck-naked silliness could follow, but it didn’t happen.”

I’d have preferred the villain of this piece to show more depth. He’s so completely odious, convinced of his power to buy whatever he wants and have everything his own way, that he’s cardboard. I believe what he does; it’s not that. I just want nuance to him, maybe a window on why he behaves that way.

At times in Light Changes Everything, I wonder whether Turner’s indulging in reverse snobbery, depicting her city folk as less caring or more prejudiced than country folk, to a point approaching caricature. Except close to the end, the city characters generally seem superficial, selfish, or small-minded, with motives so very different from Mary Pearl’s that neither she nor anybody else can really grasp them. Rather, I’d have liked to see her find more to respect in them and vice versa, however awkward the culture clash. The narrative seldom allows them to view her as more than a bauble or an entertaining object of conversation, whereas they appear to exist purely as foils, when they might have worth in their own right.

But Light Changes Everything has enough humor, strength, and pure delight to power through, and the novel makes an excellent coming-of-age story.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher through my connection to Historical Novels Review.

A Full Life in a Small Room: The Anchoress

20 Monday Aug 2018

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Review: The Anchoress, by Robyn Cadwallader
FSG, 2015. 310 pp. $26

It’s 1255 in Hortham, Gloucestershire, and seventeen-year-old Sarah takes a vow to live a solitary life of penitence and prayer. She is to pray for Sir Thomas Maunsell, the lord who has granted her the living; the churchmen; and the villagers. Only women may look at her — her maids, and any women or girls who seek her counsel — and the only man who may speak to her is her confessor, Father Peter, who must do so with a curtain separating them.

What a simple premise, so simple that some readers might suppose that The Anchoress consists of interior monologues that pale by page 50. On the contrary. This gorgeous, utterly compelling novel proves, once again, that tension resides not in plot points but the conflict between an inner life and everything else. And here, everything else is plenty, starting with Sarah’s motives in renouncing the world.

A sign marking the cell of a fourteenth-century anchoress of Shere, Surrey (courtesy Suzanne Knights, Wikimedia Commons)

At first, you know only that she believes firmly in God and church teachings, and likens her vocation to an acrobat she once saw, who risked himself flying through the air, and whom she has privately nicknamed Swallow. She imagines her isolation as a risk too, rather than escape. That’s Sarah’s independent spirit showing — yes, even within the strict confines of prayer and meditation, she roams a world no one else dreams of. Of course, there’s more to her decision than faith or fancy. Add her merchant father’s desire to marry her off for commercial advantage, her sister’s death in childbirth, and a dash of teenage cussedness, and you see that Hortham’s new anchoress is no retiring maiden content to nod her pretty head to those who purport to know better.

To no surprise, Sarah’s story quickly becomes one of justice, questioning authority (divine or temporal), the nature of sin and whether women are to blame for it, and the lord’s rights over his vassals. Does Cadwallader push the boundaries of modernity a little? Maybe; at times these thirteenth-century folk seem to reason from a mindset of a later era. Yet Sarah’s emotional and intellectual growth feels completely plausible — this novel, among other things, is a coming-of-age story — and the transitions are never easy. For all that plausibility, however, Sarah’s native intelligence should have prepared her for at least one surprise that the reader figures out long before she does, but that’s a rare slip-up in an otherwise seamless narrative.

You’d expect that a person enclosed in a tiny space would have an intensely physical existence, and that’s true from the start:

I walked the length of myself in the wall with two windows to my altar, counting my steps — nine paces; that across the narrower side, from my fireplace to my squint — seven paces. This would be my world. I touched the squint, a thin window about the length of my two hands from fingertips to heel and as wide as my wrist. I knelt and looked through. It was so narrow and cut on such a sharp angle in the thick church wall that I could see only the church’s altar, its two lighted candles, and the crucifix above.

The strength of The Anchoress is how Cadwallader carries the physical throughout, in concrete, evocative language, using small moments to full effect. The nails that seal Sarah’s outer door represent, to her, the Crucifixion. She begins to see faces in the uneven surfaces of the stone wall surrounding her and imagines the two anchoresses who preceded her, hearing their voices. Images reappear, as with the juggler who made such an impression on her, and with birds that nest on her roof (birds, as symbols of innocence and freedom, matter here). These metaphors slide gently in and out of the narrative, so subtly rendered I had to remind myself that The Anchoress is a first novel.

Sarah expects that abstention from ordinary life will release her from sensations, desires, and anything earthbound. How wrong she is. A glimpse of sunlight, the nestling of the cat who insists on adopting her, the voices of the women who visit (as well as what they say) affect Sarah all the more profoundly for being unusual to her. Her scope may be a tiny sphere, but it’s jam-packed. As her second confessor, Father Ranaulf (who narrates part of the story) observes in a different context, “A woman sealed in a cell, that was all. How could it become so complicated?”

Complicated, indeed, and with an ending perhaps a bit too neat. But spinning the straw of slight circumstance into narrative gold is the novelist’s art, and The Anchoress is one of the best examples I’ve read in a while.

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

Finding True Norse: The Half-Drowned King

11 Monday Sep 2017

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Review: The Half-Drowned King, by Linnea Hartsuyker
Harper, 2017. 423 pp. $28

You’ve heard this before: A young warrior, cheated of his birthright by his cruel stepfather, dreams of restoring his lands and honor. But to do so, he’s left his ancestral home to seek glory and wealth. While he’s away, his beloved sister, who depends on him for protection, falls vulnerable to enemies who covet her for her beauty and spirit. And just as he’s about to return, a treacherous assassination attempt almost succeeds, which reveals that he has powerful foes united against him.

But where this novel differs from others that deal with similar themes and rely on similar characters is the setting, ninth-century Norway. It’s a key moment in that country’s history, when Harald Fair-Hair, a young, charismatic leader, is trying to bring myriad jealous, quarreling kings to heel and make a nation of them under his rule. It’s a strange concept, nationhood, and not everyone can get his mind around it; each chieftain worries that his claims and ambitions will be forfeit, and that he’ll owe fealty to a boy who’s done nothing special.

Harald Fair-Hair, rendered in the fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript Flateyjarbok (courtesy Árni Magnússon Institute, Iceland, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Hartsuyker captures that feeling well, without succumbing to the temptation to permit her best and brightest characters to see into the future, which would be trite as well as improbable. Rather, she lets her two main characters hold ideas that set them apart from their contemporaries, but without overdoing it. Ragnvald, the warrior who fights to regain his birthright, sees value in a single, united kingdom, which would end the constant internal feuds and provide a stronger defense against foreign raiders. He also wonders why innocent relatives of wrongdoers must be punished, or why, after a successful battle, the victors should rape, kill, and pillage at will, wreaking violence on people who can’t hurt them anymore. But Ragnvald’s not especially enlightened beyond his time. Like every other Norseman who calls himself a man, he believes insults are a fighting matter, a dangerous quality for the irascible sort he is. And like everyone else, he’s very superstitious, as when he battles what he thinks is a dead man’s spirit:

A silhouette at first against the charcoal sky, it lurched over the uneven ground. With every step it stumbled, only to recover its balance just before falling. Its clumsiness made it seem more implacable, as though it would plow over and through anything that lay in its path. It had been a big man in life, broad and bearded. Now the face seemed dark, the beard matted. Far-off lightning crackled behind it. Ragnvald stood staring at it for a moment before recovering enough to draw his sword.

Meanwhile, Ragnvald’s sister, Svanhild, has yearnings and a quick mind considered unwomanly by some. She longs to escape their stepfather and the lecherous suitor he’s arranged for her, and she dreams of taking to sea, visiting other places, even–dare she think it–marrying a raider. She has little fear of talking back to men or challenging their political beliefs, which makes her the ninth-century equivalent of a firecracker. But, just as her brother is no Abraham Lincoln, she’s no feminist, for she never assumes that her role in life could be anything other than wife and mother, or that her sons would grow up to be anything other than sturdy warriors. Hartsuyker doesn’t push too far.

She plots her story well. Nothing goes as planned, so no-and-furthermore thrives in this icy north, and simmering tempers provide all the heat anybody needs. But The Half-Drowned King, though it has its share of fighting, is more about the politics of ever-shifting alliances, how a wise leader looks beyond immediate advantage, and how Ragnvald and Svanhild hew their separate paths. Hartsuyker does the politics especially well and uses her command of Norse ways–their system of justice, for example–to great effect.

The Half-Drowned King makes for interesting historical fiction because of its setting, but it’s less satisfying in its characters, who, despite their quirks, resemble talking heads. Hartsuyker tells the story almost entirely through dialogue, and she often recaps what her characters have just said, as if it weren’t already clear. The lack of contractions can sound stilted, and you sometimes get the feeling that the speakers are expecting a bard to turn their declarations into song–which, in fact, happens occasionally.

Reflection usually comes in brief, half-illuminating bursts. Consider this example: “Her mixture of innocence and ruthlessness was charming, and he could never decide whether he wanted her to keep her pretty pictures of the world, or learn his own cruel lessons.” It’s an explanation in trite language, not an exploration, and the implied emotional transition–which whizzes by like an arrow–deserves more.

The same could be said of The Half-Drowned King, a readable but not memorable novel.

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

A Programme Too Full: Radio Girls

29 Monday May 2017

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Review: Radio Girls, by Sarah-Jane Stratford
NAL, 2016. 367 pp. $16

Maisie Musgrave, a young woman down to her last tuppence, gets a secretarial job at the BBC, a newfangled and perhaps not entirely respectable organization in 1926. After all, what is radio, how does it work, and isn’t it improper to hear a disembodied voice? But, like the protagonist in this engaging, amusing novel, the BBC is about to spread its wings and soar. The real questions involve how bumpy the ride will be, and who will learn what along the way.

Maisie, who looks, feels, and acts like a doormat, could use a lift. Growing up in Toronto, she was bullied for much of her young life, labeled “Mousie Maisie” with no kindness, yet some accuracy. Maisie has no idea who her father was, except that his name is Edwin Musgrave, and he didn’t stay long. Her stagestruck mother, Georgina, has no use for her, and her grandparents want nothing to do with her. So she has come to London, for reasons not entirely clear, feeling somehow that England offers the roots she has never known.

Consequently, getting a job at the BBC, to Maisie a posh outfit where breeding and education matter above all, is more than a godsend–it’s a lifeline. And she clings to it with all her might, which, with experience, proves stronger than she’d ever have guessed.

The first BBC aerial, atop Selfridges, the Oxford Street department store, London, 1926 (courtesy “The Dawn of the Wireless in the U.K.”)

To me, this is the best part of Radio Girls: the coming-of-age story; a young woman learning to ask questions rather than keep the silence she’s been taught; the office politics, invariably charged with sexism; and the working of a radio institution as it invents itself. Stratford excels at all this, and the narrative clips along, as Maisie learns the city, and about life:

The [tram] ride was long and she had to stand, but she didn’t mind. The car had a rhythmic sway, the bell tinkled happily, and one never knew when a sudden screech or thrust would disrupt the song, jolting them all out of their morning meditation. It was a kind of jazz, the only kind she could afford, and so she embraced the fizz of cigarette smoke, the lingering smell of coffee, and the crinkle of newspapers that added to the hum and percussion. It wasn’t stealing to read the paper over a man’s shoulder, gleaning nuggets of the world and enjoying the smell of Palmolive shaving cream. And she watched London unfold before her.

The chief conflict lies between the BBC’s director-general, Reith, and Hilda Matheson, who runs the section called Talks, and whose protegée Maisie eventually becomes. Reith is a Puritan who hates controversy or anything his nineteenth-century mind can’t wrap itself around, which is just about everything Hilda lives for. He’d fire her, if he could, but she has powerful friends, and the Talks programs–short discussions, presentations, or debates on every conceivable topic–generate tons of fan mail and expand the BBC’s audience.

I like this story, and despite my criticisms, I think Radio Girls is worth reading. Nevertheless, Stratford adds more, and that’s where she gets into trouble. The prologue, which dangles like the useless appendage it is, suggests a thriller, and yes, that subplot emerges about two-thirds of the way through, late in the game and superfluous. To be fair, the thriller part has life to it, with a couple famous figures contributing zestful dialogue and presence. But it’s too earnest by half–a screed against Fascism–and utterly improbable, whereas the rest I believe implicitly.

Besides, I’m more interested in Maisie and her struggles than in Hilda Matheson, her boss. Stratford explains in her Author’s Note that Matheson, a real historical figure, fascinates her. I agree that Matheson’s a worthy subject, perhaps for a future novel, but dragging her connection to MI5 and the clumsy thriller resolution into Radio Girls seems a stretch, at best.

I’d have also liked to see a firmer grounding in the era. Though characters talk about the Great War and the politics of the Twenties and early Thirties, you don’t see them. Stratford conveys Maisie’s poverty with great vividness, but London has no wounded veterans holding tin cups on street corners, no smog or grit to blight the air or the soul. Reith recites the mantra of a man from his time and social class, but Radio Girls doesn’t show what he’s talking about; it’s all abstract.

Reith’s a problem in himself, like the other men in this book. They have no inner lives and no contradictions, only flat surfaces, and though Stratford offers clever observations about them, the men are simply that, observed. Though I detest their sexism and what they stand for, and I cheer for Maisie and Hilda to go onward and upward, as they both like to say, I wish Radio Girls delivered more than the obvious.

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

Boy Meets Girl: The Golden Age

15 Monday May 2017

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Review: The Golden Age, by Joan London
Europa, 2016. 221 pp. $17

Unlike nearly all their extended family, twelve-year-old Frank Gold and his parents survived the Holocaust in Hungary, after which they emigrated to Perth, Western Australia, in 1946. But shortly afterward, Frank comes down with polio, a cruel blow that overwhelms his mother and father, neither of whom has much capacity for warmth or emotional expression, which leaves the boy struggling to find a reason to live or to hope. He’s a cynical lad, in some ways, too clever for his own good, though what’s underneath is raw and vulnerable. But he needs an outlet for those feelings, and he’s unlikely to find one without help.

Perth, Western Australia, as it appeared around 1955 (courtesy E. W. Digby, via Wikemedia Commons)

At the Golden Age, a small institution devoted to young polio victims, Frank, now almost thirteen, meets Elsa Briggs, six months younger than he. Until she was stricken, Elsa was a happy, radiant child, joyful and self-directed. Her parents are even less capable of facing their family tragedy than Frank’s, especially her father, who finds reasons to avoid Elsa. During his few visits to the Golden Age, he exhorts her to learn to walk again, already.

Meanwhile, Elsa’s mother, with younger children to care for, is too overwhelmed to do much, and she’s a doormat anyway. So Elsa, like Frank, feels abandoned, especially as she gathers that her younger siblings have taken over her belongings, her bedroom, her place in the house. Never having grappled for existence as Frank did, she’s less defended against her plight, which makes her both more innocent and yet more resolved, in her own quiet, self-enclosed way. She’s waiting for someone to understand her, though she doesn’t quite know it yet.

How these two brave, suffering kids find each other makes for a touching, beautiful story. But it’s not only a romance; I admire the way Elsa and Frank begin to realize themselves, how they unfold as the adults they will become. Which is only natural, for love would otherwise be impossible–and make no mistake, their feelings are real, not puppy love.

Being close made them stronger. They sat talking on the verandah or the back lawn. Their faces had colour. For some weeks now they’d shared the lonely task of rehabilitation, doing their exercises together. The Scottish physiotherapist commented on their rapid progress and motivation. The days were not boring, but seemed to hold at every glance something to tell the other. During the night they missed each other. Each morning was a reunion.

London’s prose is sparing and her chapters short, as is the entire book. But her vision and clarity ring out from every page, and each character has an inner life, not just the principals. I’ve rarely read a novel in which the author paid so much attention to minor figures, but you never feel as if the narrative has lost its way. On the contrary; everything fits. What’s more, the story, though more or less plotless, never flags, as each small moment takes on great significance. And the Golden Age is no Dickensian horror but a warm, sensitive, caring environment, staffed by hard-working people.

Rather, the horrors are the parents, who don’t know how to deal with their children’s illness except as a slap, a shame, a comment on themselves, which only sharpens the divide the kids feel from the outside world. By contrast, Olive Penny, the head nurse, is an intuitive, empathic soul who understands her charges and refuses to judge them. Her search for love mirror’s Frank and Elsa’s, though of course she’s coming from a vastly different perspective. She doesn’t expect much, but she’s not bitter about it–she gets that life has its limits, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

Other parallels to Frank and Elsa’s tale are those of Meyer and Ida, his parents. They struggle with their feelings of displacement from Europe, the guilt of having survived, their terror that, as so-called New Australians, they’ll be perpetual foreigners–or, in Ida’s case, her refusal to accept Australia as her permanent home. Meyer unbends more easily and, as such, can help Frank more. But in the end, Frank has his own path to follow, and, true to himself, he finds it from a fellow patient, a boy older than himself who writes poetry in his head while ensconced in an iron lung.

If I have one bone to pick with The Golden Age, it’s that London sometimes tells too much. But she also shows plenty, and with such a light hand that it’s hard to find fault. What a remarkable novel.

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

Fathers and Sons: Ithaca

27 Monday Feb 2017

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Review: Ithaca, by Patrick Dillon
Pegasus, 2016. 264 pp. $26

Imagine a boy reaching the age of sixteen, never having met his father but having heard the most incredible stories of his heroism in battle, strength, daring, leadership, and cleverness. The boy is certain he shares none of these qualities, except, perhaps, the last. But cleverness alone won’t protect his mother, who’s besieged by oafish, ambitious suitors she can’t get rid of, and who eat up whatever wealth the father left behind when he went to war–the boy’s inheritance. The only hope the son can cling to, and it’s not much, is that his father will, no, must return and put things right. But that hope competes against anger at the father’s irresponsibility and selfishness for staying away so long. And when an old friend passes through, he lets drop a remark like a lightning bolt: Your father’s a liar.

Slaughter of Penelope's suitors by Odysseus, Telemachus, and Eumeus, ca. 330 BCE (Courtesy Louvre, via Wikimedia Commons)

Slaughter of Penelope’s suitors by Odysseus, Telemachus, and Eumeus, ca. 330 BCE (Courtesy Louvre, via Wikimedia Commons)

This is the premise to Dillon’s inventive, gripping take on Odysseus’s return to Ithaca following the Trojan War, except that the key figure here is Telemachus, the son. At once a coming-of-age story and a narrative about martial charisma, Ithaca asks, What is the measure of a man? Fighting is the way of Telemachus’s world, but he’s never learned how; Odysseus wasn’t there to teach him. To be sure, the warriors who plague his mother and drive her deeper and deeper within herself give their calling a poor reputation. They’re vain, pompous, rude, and coarse, abusive to their subordinates (or those whom they’d like to make subordinate), and, if they perceive a slight, will kill by way of answer. Naturally, young Telemachus hates and mistrusts them, and would never want to be like them:

I . . . look down at. . . the washing lines festooned with young men’s clothes, at the tents made of carpets draped over furniture dragged from the great hall, at the targets daubed on the walls, the piles of smashed jars, broken sticks and abandoned wine-skins. I breathe in the stench rising from the pit they use as a toilet, and the fire of sawn-up furniture whose smoke is already dirtying the clean morning air. . . I don’t want to think about what I’ve just seen: a man killed casually in a knife fight over a girl, his body left lying in a pool of blood. I try to remember what the courtyard looked like when I was little.

But he also fears them and hates his powerlessness, and he worries what will happen to his mother and himself should these quarrelsome guests ever put aside their rivalries to act in concert. Reluctantly, he leaves Ithaca to search for Odysseus, and his first stop is Pylos, where old Nestor rules, his father’s good friend and comrade-in-arms. Nestor has no news, but he wants to help. He sends his daughter, Polycaste, a girl of Telemachus’s age, to guide the boy to Sparta and its king, Menelaus, the victor of the Trojan War. His ships range all over Greek and foreign waters, so if anyone knows what happened to Odysseus, Menelaus will.

The journey entails much more than a visit to a powerful lord, however, and Dillon turns his skill and insight toward a main theme of the novel: how the ability to fight defines masculinity and sexual power. In a switch, Polycaste is the warrior, whereas Telemachus hardly knows how to hold a sword. (Wouldn’t it have to be that way, or Nestor would never have put them together?) The author portrays Menelaus as a braggart and a bore, but he’s also a miserable soul who possesses everything in the world except happiness. It’s a terrific characterization.

The narrative shifts into Odysseus’s frame, as he lodges with a Phoenician trader and his wife, recovering until he’s fit to make the final voyage to Ithaca. Again, Dillon explores the sexual power theme, as he shows the trader’s daughter, Nausicaa, drooling over the shipwrecked hero. But the others react very differently, and though they feel the draw of Odysseus’s words when he tells of his travels and wars, they privately reserve judgment. Is it possible that he’s lying about details or even entire exploits, an uncertainty that goes back to the question that plagues Telemachus? And even if what Odysseus says is true, do his adventures always suggest cleverness and a deft hand, or do greed, bungling, and poor seamanship play a part?

Ithaca is a fascinating tale, even–especially–if you’ve read the Odyssey or know the myth.

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