Tag Archives: coming of age

Internal Medicine: The Winter Soldier

05 Monday Nov 2018

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Review: The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason
Little, Brown, 2018. 319 pp. $28

In 1915, war sends Lucius Krzelewski, a third-year Polish medical student, to a regimental hospital somewhere on the Polish front. But what that sounds like bears no relation to what he finds there — he’s the only doctor, aided by a single nurse and three orderlies, and they toil inside a dark, dank, freezing church whose roof has a large hole in it. They have no x-ray machine, laboratory, or hospital beds, and though they have fairly steady supplies of dressings, carbolic, morphine, and chloral, the emergency medicine is far from anything Lucius has ever heard of. In fact, he’s hardly ever touched a patient, his training having consisted of rote memory and recitations. He does possess an extraordinary internalized representation of what the human body looks like beneath the skin, and his diagnostic instincts are very sharp. Unfortunately, what matters now is how quickly and effectively he can perform amputations.

However, Sister Margarete, the nurse, is there to teach him, and he proves a quick study. Not always quick enough for her taste, to be sure — she has a sardonic way of observing formalities that tells him she knows more about his inexperience than she’s letting on. She also senses his social unease, though not its cause, a stuffy, aristocratic upbringing:

He wondered if he had grown up in another time or place — among a different, silent people, his unease would never have been noticed. But in Vienna, among the eloquent, where frivolity had been cultivated into a faith, he knew that others saw him falter. Lucius: the name, chosen by his father after the legendary kings of Rome, itself was mockery; he was anything but light. By his thirteenth birthday, so terrified by his mother’s disapproval, so increasingly uncertain of anything to say at all, his unease began to appear in a quiver of his lip, a nervous twisting of his fingers, and at last, a stutter.

Ever since then, Lucius has seldom been able to talk to anyone easily, unless it’s about medicine, for which he has that preternatural, internal feel. It is his life raft, his hope, his balm for what ails him, a malady he cannot diagnose. Yet he can talk to sister Margarete. That in itself is astonishing, for she belongs to the Order of Saint Catherine of Siena, speaks about lice in biblical phrases, and has been known to withhold painkillers from patients who try to trespass certain boundaries, a mistake they don’t make twice.

Yet this formidable, utterly correct angel of mercy isn’t all she seems, any more than Lucius is, which may explain the growing, unspoken attraction between them. The jacket cover typically tells too much, so I advise against reading it, but this much I’ll say: The arrival of a soldier suffering acute shell shock provides a defining moment in the narrative.

And those hospital scenes are terrific. Mason is not only an exceptionally accomplished novelist, he teaches psychiatry. You sense that his portrayal of psychological battle trauma, terse and stripped-down as it is, is all the more authentic, without a trace of the theatrical. Likewise, his depictions of incompetence, class-consciousness, bitter ethnic rivalry, and utter disarray within the Austro-Hungarian Army ring absolutely true. There’s a brief battle scene (which, though vivid, seems a bit contrived), but Mason’s more concerned with suffering behind the lines and what people can and will do when they are pushed far enough. Only in those circumstances can Lucius see his shortcomings and capacities, which is why, despite the intense cruelty, pain, and heartache, his experience transforms him. Internal medicine, indeed.

Where The Winter Soldier troubles me is toward the beginning and the end. Once Lucius sets eyes on his so-called regimental hospital, the forward narrative pauses for forty or so pages to recount his upbringing and education. It’s interesting, mostly, beautifully written, and often darkly funny, yet I found myself saying, Oh, come on, already. Does the novel need all of this material, and must it come right there? I invite you to decide, as with the ending, not all of which seems entirely credible to me.

But The Winter Soldier is an excellent novel, an unusual tale of romance and coming of age, set against an equally unusual portrayal of war.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, where this post first appeared in shorter, different form.

Friend, Ogre, or Both: Napoleon’s Last Island

07 Monday Nov 2016

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Review: Napoleon’s Last Island, by Thomas Keneally
Atria, 2016. 423 pp. $30

This engrossing novel imagines Napoleon’s final years, when the Royal Navy escorts him to St. Helena, an island in the South Atlantic, where he is to live out his days. Since the British assume that their famous prisoner has other hopes, if not explicit plans, for escape, they’ve chosen St. Helena for its lack of beaches and position athwart key trade routes, including that from India.

Napoléon at St. Helena, by François-Joseph Sandmann, undated (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Napoléon at St. Helena, by François-Joseph Sandmann, undated (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

From the moment Napoleon arrives in Jamestown, the only town on St. Helena, he casts a spell:

The dread that seized the port in that instant was not only for the man’s devilish reputation, not only for the fact that he was the Great Ogre, but once more that his tread would rock the earth, and that the escarpments above Jamestown would shatter, and boulders the size of God’s hand would descend on the town’s humble roofs. Many indeed must have felt like that, since when the cutter was not so far off, the crowd, which had been vocal all day, grew near to silence, and what had been shouts became whispers. . . .

Like many Englishmen in St. Helena, William Balcombe is fascinated beyond mere curiosity. Known to intimates as Billy, he works for a trading firm doing business with the East India Company. He’s been granted a sizable residence, with orchard and lands surrounding, and a separate house that, with minor alterations, provides a suitable home for Napoleon and his small retinue. Indeed, Billy, a man who likes giving dinner parties where wine flows freely, is delighted to have such close acquaintance to the prisoner, whose charm quickly wins over all the Balcombes–save one.

That one is daughter Betsy, about to enter her teenage years. Known as “impudent” or “wild,” Betsy–to the special horror of the emperor’s retinue–uses her growing skill at the French language to ask him how, for example, he could abandon one army in Egypt and another in Russia. These are excellent questions, and you’d think that the people who’d dubbed him ogre would applaud her acumen. But no; she’s punished instead for her willfulness, though the ogre himself insists that he likes her frankness, even if it takes him up short.

Naturally, Betsy’s less interested in great campaigns than the battle for her own dignity, and she’s trying to figure out whether, say, the games of blind-man’s-bluff she plays with Napoleon are fit for a person such as herself on the verge of womanhood. But that only adds layers to this most unusual story. I can’t think of any other coming-of-age novels in which the mentor character is such a famous, controversial figure, and Keneally uses this relationship to masterful effect. At times the narrative, with its intense focus on manners and social signals, reminds me of Austen, but with a twist: You can feel the dust of lost empires and passionate enmities that would flame at the slightest provocation.

Betsy seeks Napoleon out not just because he’s famous or charming. If Betsy looks to a Bonaparte for her education, it’s because the Balcombes provide none. She has an older sister, Jane, who’s so straight and narrow, forever hoping to set a good example, that even Betsy, who loves her, tires of her; one reason Betsy must test everything and everyone around her is that Jane won’t. (Is it coincidence that Daughters of Mars, Keneally’s fine novel about Australian nurses in the First World War, also featured two sisters, one impulsive, one restrained?) But the Balcombes, chalking Betsy’s behavior up to an ungovernable character, miss the point completely. Napoleon’s got spine, a quality the girl’s father sorely lacks–to his family’s great detriment–and it never occurs to Billy that his younger daughter would even want or need to know what this substance is all about. And in her quest to understand feelings that lie just beyond her ken, she learns about truth-telling, secrets, and power.

The latter lesson comes painfully to the fore when a new governor comes to St. Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe. What a nasty piece of work he is–petty, sadistic, self-righteous, paranoid, and determined to punish Bonaparte any way he can. Since by now the exile is Our Great Friend to the Balcombes, this makes their connection a matter of state, with potentially disastrous consequences for William and his family. The narrative drops hints about this–Betsy narrates from retrospect–so it comes as no surprise. But if I can say this about a writer I admire as much as Thomas Keneally, I’d prefer he just tell the story. No portents necessary, here.

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

A Different Southern Belle: The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

06 Sunday Sep 2015

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Review: The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, by Anton DiSclafani
Riverhead, 2013. 390 pp. $30

Fifteen-year-old Thea Atwell has it made. Her family, which consists of her parents, her twin brother, Sam, and herself, live in a manorial home on a thousand acres in Florida. She has her own pony and is an expert rider, a cool daredevil on horseback. It’s the early 1930s, but the Depression hasn’t touched her; a citrus farm supplements her father’s income as the local physician, the only doctor for miles around.

However, as the story opens, Thea has been banished, with no explanation or negotiation, to a girls’ riding camp in western North Carolina. Something has happened for which she takes the blame, though part of her objects, even as she struggles with her shame. Nevertheless, she believes her punishment to be temporary, for the summer only, yet you sense that she’s kidding herself. There’s a reason two hundred girls have gathered here, and it’s not just to improve their equestrienne skills or learn to become ladies in the Southern style, perfect in posture, manners, and elocution.

That reason, however, is a secret, which DiSclafani skillfully keeps, drawing out the tension. The careful reader may guess, as with much else that happens, but if so, that doesn’t matter. Thea’s story, a coming-of-age with a sharp edge, is well worth following, and she learns some very hard lessons at a young age. The rawness may put some readers off, but the author has much to say worth hearing about sex, gender, families, and the stifling nature of white Southern gentility, though many attitudes she explores are of course not peculiar to the South.

Perhaps to heighten Thea’s sense of dislocation, as if her shameful exile to a different state weren’t enough, DiSclafani has made her a hothouse flower. She has never attended school beyond her father’s lessons and never socialized with anyone her own age except Sam and their cousin, Georgie. Consequently, Thea has no clue how to act when suddenly thrust among hundreds of strangers, and every glance, every gesture, carries the potential for acceptance or ostracism.

Unemployed man eating at the Volunteers of America soup kitchen, Washington, D.C., 1932 (Courtesy FDR Library, National Archives).

Unemployed man eating at the Volunteers of America soup kitchen, Washington, D.C., 1936 (Courtesy FDR Library, National Archives).

I found this hard to swallow, both as a premise and in the writing. Some emotional transitions feel overwrought, especially when Thea flip-flops from, say, hope to misery within a single sentence, all of it told, none of it earned. That bothered me but was less pervasive than the trouble with her family life, which seems hermetically sealed beyond belief. Has she really never seen anyplace except the homestead? The Great Depression ravaged the South more than any other region of the United States, yet Thea has no sense of it. People still continue to get sick, so her father continues to collect his fees–or so the narrative says, as if they always had the money to pay. There are no shacks, no Hoovervilles, no pellagra, no summonses at midnight for dirt-poor patients who put off getting medical attention until they’re dying. There are no black people, either, or stories of violence, interracial or otherwise. The culture of the riding camp feels lived in and may reflect the time, but the story doesn’t quite feel Depression-era.

What’s true in Yonahlossee, however, is Thea’s hunger for love and acceptance, and how she goes about finding them, sometimes in forbidden ways. She also begins to question her family’s motives and behavior, realizing their dishonesty and selfishness, and, to some extent, how unfair they were to punish her. As the most sympathetic adult character in the book–significantly, from New England, not the South–tells her in confidence:

Parents never trust their children. I don’t know what happened exactly, and you don’t need to tell me. I believed for a long time that I had shamed my family. But it’s in a family’s best interest to make a child believe that.

This passage spoke loudly to me. What Thea does with this notion makes her story important enough to overlook narrative flaws or implausibilities.

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

Brontë Revisited: The Flight of Gemma Hardy

27 Monday Apr 2015

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Review: The Flight of Gemma Hardy, by Margot Livesey
Harper, 2012. 447 pp. $27

When Gemma Hardy, a plain, shy orphan, loses her kind uncle to drowning, the roof caves in. Her aunt and cousins turn on her as though she were responsible, yet, as the astute young girl quickly notices, she’s the only one to mourn him. Humiliated daily, accused of sins she doesn’t commit, and punished when she pushes back, Gemma comes to believe that anything she loves will be squashed, and that no one will love or accept her.

Offered the chance to go to Claypoole, a girls’ boarding school, Gemma seizes it with both hands. A sympathetic teacher tries to warn her that where she’s headed will feel more like an orphanage than a school, but she’s so desperate to escape–and to learn–that she ignores his advice. On arriving at Claypoole, she realizes that he was right: As a “working girl,” she’s more servant than student and the object of scorn and bullying, in which the faculty take the lead.

No, this isn’t Dickensian London, though at least one adult to whom she manages to reveal her plight invokes the comparison. It’s 1950s Scotland, and the literary ancestor is Brontë, not Dickens. Livesey has set out to retell Jane Eyre, and what a captivating, satisfying job she does. I don’t remember the original that well, but Gemma meets her Rochester–a Mr. Sinclair, who owns a country house in the Orkneys–and their complicated relationship is fraught with untold secrets, none of which involves a madwoman or an attic.

St. Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkneys (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the US).

St. Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkneys (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the US).

I’d guess that Gemma has more poetry and resourcefulness in her than Jane, and maybe a stronger spirit of independence, though Gemma can more likely afford that, living a century later. Livesey paints the era lightly, in the background, yet it’s there, in the gradual, increasing breadth of opportunity for women not born to wealth or social position.

However, the real story here is of course Gemma’s struggle to find a place–any place–for herself. Her late uncle was a minister, and when she ventures into his study, she comes across his last sermon, left half-written at his death:

We each begin as an island, but we soon build bridges. Even the most solitary person has, perhaps without knowing it, a causeway, a cable, a line of stepping-stones, connecting him or her to others, allowing for the possibility of communication and affection.

Gemma spends the rest of the novel trying to realize these words and to understand what more her uncle might have said about them had he lived. Her journey takes her a long way, not in miles but in insight, and through many a heartache. Her hunger for connection, and her setbacks in finding it, lead her to think, “Not everyone who was fond of me died, but everyone came to harm.” However, she never, ever stops striving.

The calamities come thick and fast, at times, but I never felt the narrative descended into melodrama, because–those of you who’ve read my reviews can guess what I’m about to say–Gemma has a highly developed inner life. Her dreams and desires feel real and earned, and Livesey has taken care to make even Gemma’s worst tormentors real people, invariably because they have their own torments and terrors. The brutes in Livesey’s world behave cruelly mostly because they feel precarious too. That they may also gain by it matters, of course, yet it’s secondary.

Livesey grew up in Scotland, and she renders her native landscape, harsh as it sometimes appears, with such beauty that I feel a stirring to visit the Orkneys. She plays down the Gothic elements, a choice that suits me fine, though they’re there–voices in the wind, legends, a character or two with second sight. Toward the end, Gemma goes through a couple emotional transitions that passed by a bit quickly, maybe with more ease than I expected, and a final scene that comes about rather neatly. But this is a small criticism to make of a terrific novel.

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