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Class Warfare in Spokane: The Cold Millions

14 Monday Jun 2021

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Review: The Cold Millions, by Jess Walter
Harper, 2020. 337 pp. $29

Spokane, Washington, in 1909 makes a volatile mixture. Some townspeople get by, a few live in luxury, while a vast army of loggers, miners, prostitutes, and hobos struggles to exist. Into that cauldron leaps the I.W.W., the International Workers of the World, known as Wobblies, whose stated goal is to organize workers into a union that capital must recognize, and to do so without violence. For that, they are called anarchists, revolutionaries, subversives, and agitators, chiefly at the behest of Spokane’s wealthiest citizens, who own the mines, logging companies, real estate, flophouses, saloons, and brothels. But the Wobblies won’t back down and have planned a Free Speech demonstration; the local constabulary, corrupt to the core, will be ready.

Before that happens, however, a policeman is killed, and suspicion immediately falls on the migrant workers, tramps, and other “undesirables” who’ve floated into town. But the newcomers, among whom are sixteen-year-old Ryan (Rye) Dolan and his older brother Gregory (Gig), don’t know this yet. In fact, they know very little of what’s in store:

They woke on a ball field — bums, tramps, hobos, stiffs. Two dozen of them spread out on bedrolls and blankets in a narrow floodplain just below the skid, past taverns, tanners, and tents, shotgun shacks hung like hounds’ tongues over the Spokane River. Seasonal work over, they floated in from mines and farms and log camps, filled every flop and boardinghouse, slept in parks and alleys in the pavilions of traveling preachers and, on the night just past, this abandoned ball field, its infield littered with itinerants, vagrants, floaters, Americans.

Gig’s a Wobbly (and a drunk), while Rye devotes himself to one cause, trying to keep his older brother out of trouble. Pigs will fly before he succeeds. And even after a violent confrontation with vigilantes who offer them the choice between getting flung in the river or a broken head, the brothers have seen nothing yet. After all, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn will come to lead the Free Speech demonstration.

Joe Hill wrote this song about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 1915 (courtesy NYU Library via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Perhaps the most famous labor organizer in America at that time, Flynn, as Walter portrays her, is about the best stump speaker this side of Teddy Roosevelt and more than a match for any man foolish enough to debate her. But even the Wobblies’ labor allies wonder what a pretty, pregnant, nineteen-year-old “girl” is doing (a) away from her husband, and (b) speaking to workingmen, often in terms no modest wife would ever utter, even in private. The Dolan boys are smitten, especially Rye. I don’t blame him one bit.

With exceptional economy, prose, and storytelling punch, Walter justifies his considerable reputation with The Cold Millions. The narrative reads like a thriller about labor strife, with “no — and furthermore” thriving everywhere. Life’s a fight to the finish, and so much wrong blankets the landscape, you seldom know where right is hiding itself, let alone how to act accordingly. In other words, the novel captures the divisions and desperation of a bygone era that seem remarkably like the present.

Flynn is pure electricity, and you can see the sparks; the novel crackles whenever she appears. The Dolan brothers represent Everyman, men who’ve had hard luck and want only a fair chance to improve it. But as Ryan observes, “Hell, it took only your first day in a Montana flop or standing over your mother’s unmarked grave to know that equal was the one thing all men were not. A few lived like kings, and the rest hugged the dirt until it cracked open and took them home.”

What powerful stuff, and Walter deals it straight. There’s no sugarcoating, only an occasional kindness or flash of decency. Sometimes, you can tell the good guys and bad guys apart too easily, yet in the author’s defense, the stakes are such that there’s no straddling allowed. I do wish that Rye had more flaws; he makes mistakes, but usually out of naïveté, which he does his best to address. You pull for him, but I want to do so not just because he’s a trusting innocent. I want him to struggle more with evil instead of skirting it by instinct. I also get impatient with digressions into the backgrounds of minor characters, a few of whom wind up dead shortly thereafter, which feels unfair to the reader. Yet I’ll give Walter credit for insisting on fleshing everybody out, even if the back story becomes intrusive.

There’s also no arguing with the overall effect, which is breathtaking. Walter captures a time, place, and mindset with such brilliance, he makes it look easy. And as a fellow Washingtonian, I salute his effort to portray the Wobblies, who left their mark on the Pacific Northwest a century ago and more.

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

Vienna Blood: The Second Rider

08 Monday Apr 2019

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Review: The Second Rider, by Alex Beer
Translated from the German by Tim Mohr
Europa, 2018. 319 pp. $17

When police Inspector August Emmerich stumbles across a corpse while pursuing a black-market ring in 1919 Vienna, he refuses to do what his superiors tell him. That’s nothing new, apparently. Emmerich, a gifted detective who longs to work in homicide, the elite police unit, has made no secret of his ambition or his contempt for idiotic rules and the men who make them.

Karl-Marx-Hof,, a tenement built during the Socialist era in Vienna (courtesy © Bwag/Wikimedia)

Unfortunately for August, however, the mayor has been leaning on the police to break the black marketeering that has caused such misery in this freezing, starving, ill-clad, impoverished postwar city. Which means that even though the dead man August happens on couldn’t have committed suicide the way the coroner insists — the deceased was a shell-shocked veteran with such a debilitating tremor, he couldn’t have loaded a pistol and held it to his head — the inspector’s under orders to leave that case and crush the black market.

Naturally, his disobedience gets him into trouble, which happens about every half hour. You can’t blame him, exactly, because his superiors are much less competent than the criminals, an irony that leads to an unusual alliance. But Emmerich’s troubles aren’t always of his own making. Beer spares him nothing, so that whatever loss or indignity he can possibly endure will no doubt come his way, and soon. “No — and furthermore” doesn’t simply live here; these pages are that concept. Money trouble? Absolutely. Physical pain? He’s got it, limping from an old war wound that he dares not reveal, for fear that he’ll be farmed out to a desk job.

At times, the plot spins a little too often, too neatly, and many, many bodies fall. But Beer’s adept at testing her hero’s flair for getting out of tight spaces, and the results are often hilarious. (My favorite is the time he’s forced to impersonate a medical student during hospital rounds, during which Emmerich proves ingenious as well as lucky.) Most of these situations occur because, after sizing up the incredible risks he faces, he goes ahead nevertheless.

Along the way, he tries to train his newbie assistant, Ferdinand Winter, a young man whose sensitivities, desire to follow the rules, and privileged background earn his boss’s disdain. Winter’s grandmother, who openly mourns the kaiser and seems to blame Emmerich for his abdication, adds a little spice — and thievery — to the relationship between the two men. But Emmerich, who’s had a hard life, is compassionate at heart, showing regard for anyone in Vienna struggling to get by, especially veterans like himself, so you sense that eventually, he’ll warm to Ferdinand.

Meanwhile, though, the pair witness a city still reeling from the war, suffering hopelessness, tuberculosis, pervasive crime, and crushing poverty. It’s enough to break anyone’s heart:

As he had feared, inside they encountered the most miserable squalor. The dwelling — this form of lodging didn’t deserve the name home — was a dark hole with barely any air to breathe. Passing through the musty kitchen, its walls covered with mold, they entered a room that served as the living room, bedroom, and work space. It was perhaps four strides across, six strides long, and dimly lit by a flickering petroleum lamp. That was it. No other space.

The atmosphere in which Beer immerses her characters provides more than background. The homeless shelters (five-night limit), the incessant thievery, degradation, and sickness contrast sharply with the few oases of wealth and privilege. Beer knows her postwar Vienna thoroughly, selecting just the right details, and you breathe the same foul air as her characters, smell the same vile odors.

The Second Rider (which, by the way, refers to the Four Horsemen) introduces a series. If the subsequent installments are anything like this one, I predict many successful adventures for August Emmerich.

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

A Pox on Those Borgias: In the Name of the Family

01 Monday May 2017

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Review: In the Name of the Family, by Sarah Dunant
Random House, 2017. 429 pp. $28

The best fiction portrays larger-than-life characters as real people, and you couldn’t ask for larger figures than the Borgia clan. Here, the sequel to Blood and Beauty, Dunant gives us a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century pope who raises corruption to a high art, even for the papacy, and two of his infamous, illegitimate children. Cesare’s a murderous, charismatic military genius of absolutely no scruple who terrorizes half of Italy. He also has, shall we say, deeper than brotherly feelings toward his beautiful, younger sister, Lucrezia, whose marriages he arranges and whose husbands he disposes of according to whim.

Bartolomeo Veneto’s portrait of a young woman, possibly Lucrezia Borgia, ca. 1510 (courtesy National Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the U.S.)

What Dunant does with these remarkable figures–and, by the way, throw in Niccolò Machiavelli, Florence’s envoy to Cesare–is itself extraordinary. I won’t say she makes Cesare sympathetic, which would be asking too much. He’s not the only politician who can wield a knife blade, either himself or by proxy, yet Dunant makes no excuses for his particular brand of viciousness. But she does show his passionate attachment to his sister (the incestuous current largely omitted in this book, oddly enough), and his attempts to end brigandage and corrupt taxation. He even earns the loyalty of certain people, at least those not related to the bodies dumped in the nearest river. Likewise, though his father, Pope Alexander VI, is the definition of venality, he also loves his children deeply, as well as the courtesans who bore them. So he’s a real person too, with a sense of humor, a cheerful outlook, and more avarice than most, but again, not alone, there.

However, Lucrezia holds the center. Only twenty-two but on her third husband, the heir to the dukedom of Ferrara, she’s well aware that she lives in a house of cards. Her presence in Ferrara pacifies the powerful Este family and keeps them grudging allies of the Borgias; the immense dowry she brought doesn’t hurt, either. But her aging father-in-law, the current duke, makes no secret of his disdain for her, and should she fail to produce an heir, the only thing standing between her and a sorry end is Cesare’s army. And Cesare, though he seems never to lose a battle, is dying a slow, miserable death from “the French pox,” also known as syphilis.

Dunant excels at small moments, and she renders her characters’ inner lives with a sure hand, no mean feat when they’re historical personages whose psychology may or may not emerge in sketchy contemporary sources. Take, for example, Lucrezia’s first official meeting with her husband-to-be, Alfonso, who unfortunately shares a name with her predecessor, the one she truly loved:

Noblewomen are early connoisseurs in the art of the courtly kiss, and over these last weeks Lucrezia has been gobbled and pecked, dribbled on and stubble-scraped, has even felt the nibble of teeth and odd teasing flash of a tongue. But this, this, she thinks, is more like a wet dog flopping down onto a hearth. As he [Alfonso] lifts his head, she takes in a lungful of sweat and leather. If perfume has been applied, it is long lost in the dust between here and Ferrara.

Dunant intends to show not only that Lucrezia’s a pawn in the Borgia’s power game, but how all women of that time are invisible except as sex objects. It’s not just that men succeed in labeling women as temptresses, the embodiment of sin, the weaker vessel, and all that. It’s that women are unworthy of serious notice, so that, for instance, medicine hasn’t bothered to study whether men can transmit the French pox to women, and what happens when they do. Or, on a more intimate level, Alfonso and Lucrezia feel strain in one another’s company, yet he sees no reason to learn how to talk to her. Even Machiavelli, who lives to talk politics and history, refuses to do so with his wife, Marietta, whose only legitimate role is to endure his long absences and infidelities.

All this is excellent, sometimes brilliant, even, and always interesting. Yet In the Name of the Family doesn’t quite hold together for me. The narrative depends on episodes, many of which could drop out of the book and leave the plot unchanged. Nothing that Macchiavelli does or says, really matters, for instance. Each episode may keep the pages turning, but they don’t always feel connected, except by chronology, so there’s no crescendo of tension, no climax. The end just peters out.

To an extent, Dunant has little choice, because history doesn’t cooperate with timely cataclysms, and, to her resounding credit, she’s faithful to history. Nevertheless, reading In the Name of the Family sometimes feels like fictionalized history rather than a novel. I still recommend it; I think it deserves wide readership; but I liked Blood and Beauty more.

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

Stifling Assumptions: Among the Living

28 Monday Nov 2016

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Review: Among the Living, by Jonathan Rabb
Other Press, 2016. 303 pp. $26

When Yitzhak Goldah, a Czech Holocaust survivor, lands among his American cousins in Savannah, Georgia, in 1947, he at once becomes an object of fascination and dread in the Jewish community. Most people act as if they want to know what happened to him and what he feels about it. But they don’t, really. They’re scared of what he might say, but even more of what that would force them to reckon with–their guilt at having escaped, while their European brethren were murdered.

Congregation Mickve Israel, Savannah, Georgia, 2015 (Courtesy Jud McCranie, via Wikimedia Commons)

Congregation Mickve Israel, Savannah, Georgia, which dates from 1735, as it appeared in 2015 (Courtesy Jud McCranie, via Wikimedia Commons)

So they make sympathetic noises, and when he doesn’t respond the way they hope or think he should, they ascribe his reaction to “all you’ve been through,” without an inkling of what that is. And since he’s reticent by nature, a trait that his experiences at Theresienstadt and Birkenau only reinforced, he lets them assume what they wish, unwilling to reveal more and sensing that they wouldn’t hear it anyway.

He’s right. His cousins and benefactors, Abe and Pearl Jesler, have done their best to make him over. They haven’t even driven him home from the train station before they’ve told him that from now on, he should be Ike, not Yitzhak (Isaac, in English); he’ll work at Abe’s shoe store; attend services at their Orthodox synagogue; and, oh, by the way, there’s a party tonight in your honor, so you’ll want to take a nap first.

Ike feels more comfortable among the black servants and shoe-store employees (who of course are the ones to fetch and haul). It’s not just that he recognizes people who have suffered, or that, like him, they stand outside the gate of what’s accepted and acceptable, though he does so by choice. He grasps implicitly their fate never to be spoken of as an equal, for he endured that too; but again, he’s left that behind, whereas they’re still trapped. But more than that, he finds that Calvin, who tends Abe’s stock room, and Raymond, Calvin’s son, who drives a delivery truck, speak directly, from the heart, and he yearns for that.

He finds it also with Eva, a young war widow with whom he strikes up an immediate rapport. But to Abe, Pearl, and their community, Eva’s the enemy, because she’s Reform, not Orthodox. Maybe you’ve heard the old jokes about the town with two Jews and three synagogues, or about the Jewish castaway who builds two houses of worship on his island, so he can have one that he doesn’t go to. But here, it’s no joke, and Rabb nails that tribal fractiousness dead-center. Ike and Eva ignore the social pressure, but they’re lucky to have an ally. Her father runs a local newspaper, and Ike was a journalist in Prague before the war. You can guess where that will lead.

However, Rabb introduces a further complication, and here’s where things get tense. A woman whom Ike knew from Prague, and whom he thought had died in the camps, comes to Savannah too. And she says he promised to marry her, and that he owes her a good life, at least an attempt at what the Nazis interrupted. They don’t love each other and probably never did. Yet, as she says, if he turns her away, he’ll have to live with that forever. So what does he do? What can he do?

There’s much to like about Among the Living. I admire Rabb’s gift for economy, conveying what remains unsaid during social interactions, and his pitch-perfect rendering of innuendo and gossip. The story offers rich material in which to explore fear, prejudice, and trauma, much of which the author suggests with a subtle hand. For instance, a subplot concerning corruption at Savannah’s docks, for which Raymond pays a gruesome price, provides a contrast to Ike: Rabb sets the hero victim who stands as rebuke to repression against a black man who remains unknown and unsung, and for whom justice doesn’t exist. It’s a nice touch, and it makes you think.

Nevertheless, this lovely novel doesn’t deliver on its promise. Rabb captures the tribal milieu, but he doesn’t persuade me that this is 1947, and that everyone’s recovering from a world war. Rather, so intent is he on separating Ike’s experiences from everyone else’s, it’s as if the war had been an event in which participation was entirely voluntary, and most people in Savannah had simply opted out. Further, though Ike and Eva are engaging characters, I don’t know them as well as I’d like, particularly why he attracts her so easily, though I can see it the other way around. Finally, Rabb does his best to keep you guessing about how things will turn out, but I think he needed to push his characters further away from the happiness they deserve. With a subject like this, it’s hard to balance fairness with a satisfying reality, and yet, I wanted more from Among the Living.

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

Vietnam, Up Close: The Man from Saigon

03 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: The Man from Saigon, by Marti Leimbach
Nan Talese/Doubleday, 2009. 342 pp. $26

Have you ever read a first-rate novel that still leaves you unsatisfied? For me, The Man from Saigon is one, because, good as it is, it should be ten times better. The subject is riveting, the writing sublime, and the plot couldn’t have more tension. Yet though I believe everything that happens to the characters, I don’t believe what happens between them.

You can’t argue with the premise, though, or with how Leimbach carries it out. It’s 1967, and Susan Gifford, who writes for a women’s magazine, goes to Vietnam to cover the war. The story follows her fumbling efforts to understand Saigon, where everything and everyone is for sale; the climate seems too crushing to withstand; and the American officers conducting press briefings treat her with even more contempt than they do her male colleagues. Susan quickly realizes that to file anything worthwhile, she must get up-country, which she does, with the help of Marc, a TV reporter, and Son, a Vietnamese photographer whom no one else trusts.

American soldiers carry a wounded comrade through a swamp in Vietnam, 1969 (Courtesy National Archives)

American soldiers carry a wounded comrade through a swamp in Vietnam, 1969 (Courtesy National Archives)

Leimbach renders these events so vividly that it’s as if you too were getting spat on by the teenage prostitutes on Tu Do Street, huddling in a bunker under bombardment firmly convinced that the next incoming shell will kill you, or watching an army surgeon coked on Dexadrine performing operations round the clock.

And then the story really kicks into gear. Susan and Son join a supply mission heading into the Mekong Delta, supposedly nothing dangerous. But the Viet Cong ambush the column, capture the two journalists, and set out to find their own unit, from which they too have become separated. They take Susan’s boots, spare clothes, and personal possessions, and though she tries, through Son, to explain that she’s not a spy, a soldier, or a threat, they can’t understand what she’s doing there or why. So beyond the cuts on her feet, which become infected, or feeling dizzy and faint from lack of food and water, she fears every second for her life and Son’s.

Leave a box of vegetables in the sun and that is the smell. Lie on asphalt at noon on an August day and that is the temperature. The heat rises from the ground, bombards you from above. The dense brush, the banyan trees, their branches intertwined, connect at the top to form a canopy, allowing no breeze. . . . She has been on such marches before, always with a company of Americans, always with Son who carried the bulk of the equipment. It is different now. A kind of timelessness has set in. She keeps thinking she is dying, that she is walking with a ghost.

I’ve read many eyewitness accounts of the Vietnam War, the centerpiece of my teenage years, but I’ve never read anything as visceral as The Man from Saigon. The pigheaded nature of American policy, the duplicity, the savagery on both sides, the corruption at every level, the misery and death–they’re all here, in beautifully rendered detail.

That said, however, for me, The Man from Saigon fails as anything other than a sort of journalistic fiction. Marc, the TV reporter, becomes Susan’s lover mostly because they share that terrifying bunker under fire. I’d believe that they might sleep together a few times, but not that Susan loves him, as she repeatedly claims. Their only common bond is a passion to know what the army refuses to let them see, and what lies they’re told instead, but otherwise, he’s a closed door. He says little or nothing about his life, feelings, dreams, or past–except that he’s married–and tries to drown his anxieties in drugs and alcohol. He’s got nothing to give her.

Then there’s Son, for whom her affection grows during their captivity, during which he treats her as kindly as he can, even tenderly, at moments. I think we’re meant to compare him to Marc. But Susan doesn’t know who Son really is, so can you call that love? Also, she suspects he’s working for Hanoi, yet somehow, that doesn’t matter; she never considers that his activities might cause many deaths, including those of her countrymen. About Vietnam, I’m as dovish as they come, yet I don’t see how you can duck that moral question; in war, no matter what you do, there are always consequences. And if Leimbach is trying to send a feminist message, that Son’s quiet tenderness beats Marc’s overt masculinity any day, I agree, but not because of what she writes. The narrative allows neither man much of an inner life, so the contrast feels superficial and set up–Son has a gentle character, whereas Marc has a job and an outlook. No contest, there.

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

A Dynasty Between the Sheets: The Romanovs

22 Monday Aug 2016

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Review: The Romanovs, 1613-1918, by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Knopf, 2016. 744 pp. $35

In college, I studied two semesters of Russian and Balkan history with a professor who spiced his lectures with tidbits about outsize personalities, such as the aptly named Vlad the Impaler. Indeed, so well known was Professor Marcopoulos for his dry wit and remarkable breadth of knowledge that people not enrolled in the class would ask me, “Has he gotten to Rasputin yet?” because they wanted to sit in when he did.

Fedor Rokotov's portrait of Empress Catherine the Great, 1763, now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Fedor Rokotov’s portrait of Empress Catherine the Great, 1763, now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Consequently, I can’t read a book like The Romanovs without hearing my late teacher’s voice, seeing his long, looping script as he wrote the names of key figures on the blackboard, and starting in recognition when those names, which I haven’t heard uttered in more than forty years, pop up in Montefiore’s text. There’s plenty in The Romanovs that Dr. Marcopoulos would have enjoyed, including the focus on autocrats as determinants of history, and the depth of garish splendor and corruption that marked the dynasty.

I particularly like the section on Catherine the Great, which successfully merges the story of her private life with her politics, including precious insight into the way she viewed power. “‘One must do things in such a way that people think they themselves want it to be done this way,’” she said. When challenged, Montefiore argues, she could be ruthless but was never cruel, and preferred subtle diplomacy to banging her desk with a fist. As a woman, she might not have survived otherwise; Frederick the Great, for one, a noted misogynist, thought she was incapable.

Once, when her secretary remarked on her boundless power, she laughed and replied that it wasn’t so easy. “‘I take advice, I consult and when I am convinced of general approval, I issue my orders and have the pleasure of observing what you call blind obedience. And that is the foundation of unlimited power.’” Regarding legends of her sexual appetites, Montefiore recounts her many love affairs, yet insists that all she really wanted was a warm home life, “sharing card games in her cosy apartments and discussing her literary and artistic interests with her beloved.”

Unfortunately, Catherine’s is the only full, satisfying portrait in the book. Peter the Great comes in second, and I like aspects of Montefiore’s characterizations of Alexander II and his spineless, narrow-minded grandson, Nicholas II. Overall, however, I question the historical and narrative choices Montefiore makes, his writing style, and the numbing amount of often extraneous detail.

The author explains (repeatedly) that he’s the first to research troves of private letters that have only recently been made available to historians. I understand his pride and applaud his diligence. But just because he’s found astonishingly frank letters about sexual practices, pet names, and innumerable affairs with ladies-in-waiting and ballerinas doesn’t mean these must all be included. Such tales do convey the unbelievable corruption that plagued Russia (and still does), and some are entertaining. But I can’t help think that Montefiore simply couldn’t let any of them go, an emphasis that seriously mars his work.

The Romanovs often reads, and looks like, a suitcase that’s stuffed so full that it’s ready to spring open at the slightest touch. The text repeats itself in wordy prose that can be confusing or vague or, in some cases, unintentionally funny because of poor grammar. (Montefiore also uses the word girl when the context clearly suggests woman, an annoying, provocative lapse that, incidentally, belies his portrayal of Catherine the Great as a victim of sexism.) Voluminous footnotes occupy the bottom of almost every page; if they don’t contribute to the main narrative, why are they there, and why so many? Sexual escapades take up so much room that significant historical events and movements sometimes seem almost an afterthought. And at historical turning points, the author never looks back, refusing to ask “what if,” having summarily decided–as he says once–that “counterfactual speculation is pointless.”

Really? What if it leads to deeper analysis of what actually happened? For instance, I never knew that as a prince, Alexander II visited England and charmed Queen Victoria, newly on the throne and still unmarried. Alexander’s father, Nicholas I, said, “Forget her,” and the son duly complied. But such a marriage would have changed Europe and altered the dynastic succession in Russia. Surely that’s worth a paragraph, and something illuminating might have come from it.

I can’t recommend plowing through all of The Romanovs. But, as I said, several sections are worth your time, as are the stunning photographs. I also like the last three pages very much, about the ways that subsequent Russian regimes, including Putin’s, have adopted Romanov style and policies. I could have read more about that happily.

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

A Night at the Opera: The Brewer of Preston

07 Thursday Jan 2016

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Review: The Brewer of Preston, by Andrea Camilleri
Translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli
Penguin, 2014 [1995]. 245 pp. $15

It’s a measure of how things are in this Sicilian town of Vigàta that when a destructive crime appears to have been carefully planned, the guilty party must be a “foreigner,” someone from Milan or Florence or Rome. The year is 1870, and Italy has just been legally unified for the first time since the Roman Empire, but so what? What matters in this Sicilian town is who’s bribing, cuckolding, murdering, trading back-scratches with, or blackmailing whom. Outsiders, whose sole purpose is to interfere with and impose on what they can’t understand, smell like dirty laundry aired in public and can be scented from miles away.

 

Porto Empedocle, Sicily, Camilleri's model for Vigàta (G. Melfi, 2006; via Wikimedia. Public domain)

Porto Empedocle, Sicily, Camilleri’s model for Vigàta, in 2006  (G. Melfi, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain)

 

 

Which is why the Vigàtese know implicitly that one of their own couldn’t possibly have committed the destruction that everyone’s talking about. A local would have struck out of passion, possessed by rage, incapable of cold-blooded planning. Though it may be metaphorically correct to talk of back-stabbing as the way of life here, that’s not quite accurate. It’s much more likely to happen face-to-face.

Consequently, when the new prefect, a “foreigner,” decides to produce a dreadful opera called The Brewer of Preston, he runs into trouble immediately. Nobody in town likes this opera, but the prefect doesn’t care: They’ll attend the performance anyway, because, well, they should know who’s boss. Naturally, the boss is the last one to realize where his heavy-handedness will lead–to the place he’s trying to avoid–or how hilarious, profane, and bloody the result will be.

What enrages the good citizens of Vigàta isn’t only that the jackass prefect is trying to force them to do what they don’t want. It’s the opera itself, which depends on the most ludicrous instances of mistaken identity ever to appear on a stage. After all, so few things in Sicily happen by mistake.

In Vigàta alone, and keeping only to the past three months, Artemidoro Lisca was murdered on a moonless night when he was mistaken for Nirino Contrera; Turiddruzzu Morello married Filippa Mancuso by mistake after deflowering her one night without realizing that she was not her sister Lucia, who had been the one foreordained; Pino Sciacchitano died because his wife mistook rat poison for the tonic her husband took after every meal. And suspicions in the end arose that all these mistakes were actually phony mistakes, not mistakes at all, but only alibis, even deliberate acts.

If this novel has a unifying theme–pun intended–that’s it right there: the complete and utter difficulty of figuring out what happens by accident or on purpose. The chief difference is who, if anyone, suffers legal consequences, but you can be fairly sure that nothing monumental will change.

Coincidence, if that’s what it is, plays a key role. The action hinges partly on how Mommo Friscia chooses to emit one of his famous raspberries, “which had the power, density, and brutality of a devastating earthquake or other natural disaster,” and a soprano who hits the wrong note. But these are mere details, which change in the telling.

That’s both the confusion and charm of this novel. The action unfolds out of order, from perspectives that constantly shift. Just when you think that the more-or-less honest cop, Lieutenant Puglisi, has figured out what happened, events turn that upside-down.

So if you read The Brewer of Preston, don’t approach it as a mystery or a plot with a clear, linear resolution. But do be prepared to laugh hysterically.

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

Aquarius Rising: Pompeii

30 Monday Nov 2015

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Review: Pompeii, by Robert Harris
Random House, 2005. 278 pp. $15

About halfway through this ingenious novel set in late August, 79 C.E., the corrupt villain tells the incorruptible hero, “Here’s a piece of advice for you, my friend: there’s no safer investment than property in Pompeii.”

"Vesuvius from Portici," by Joseph Wright of Derby, eighteenth century (Public domain, courtesy Titanic News Channel).

Vesuvius from Portici, by Joseph Wright, 18th-century English painter (Public domain, courtesy Titanic News Channel).

The reader cringes at the irony, but neither party to this conversation realizes that within days–hours–Vesuvius will erupt and bury the town in pumice, ash, and molten rock. It’s testament to Harris’s skill that he fashions a much-storied historical event almost two millennia old into an edge-of-your-seat thriller, despite certain elements common to the genre and therefore predictable. How does he do it? By going against the grain.

Harris could have focused on the victims, playing on their ignorance, innocence, and tragedy. There’s nothing wrong with that–we can all imagine unseen terrors striking us down–but Harris goes the other way. He shows the Pompeiians at their worst, whether the scheming politicians, the astonishingly greedy villain, his feckless friends and relations, or the townspeople, brutal, superstitious, and quick to anger.

This setup gives the author wider scope. Not only does he ratchet up the tension over whether the evil will perish along with the good, his premise opens several roads to explore. One is the thirst for money (a metaphor of double meaning here). Another compares nature’s cruelty to the human variety; to no surprise, nature comes out the better, because its ravages imply no intent. But that proposition, which (a) has implications for what civilization means; and (b) suggests a random universe, troubles these Romans. As rulers of the known world, they assume their moral superiority and humanity, while as polytheists, they worry about offending capricious gods, so that there’s no such thing as a random act. However, not all Romans in this novel accept these common beliefs. Pliny the Elder, in these pages a vivid, significant character, sets higher store by observation than what Vulcan may or may not be up to beneath Vesuvius.

So does the protagonist, Marcus Attilius. He’s a newly appointed aquarius, or engineer, who serves the Aqua Augusta, the aqueduct that supplies the region with water. Attilius possesses several virtues on which ancient Romans prided themselves: honesty, courage, willingness to work hard for the common good, and the energy to sweat the details. Coming from a long line of aquarii, he discounts Vulcan’s wrath as the reason for a mysterious break in the Aqua Augusta and its pervasive odor of sulfur. But whatever the cause, it’s his job to repair the aqueduct and solve the mystery before the public realizes their water supply has failed.

Trouble is, Ampliatus, the real estate magnate full of sage investment advice, has been building splendid baths in Pompeii, and he sees a large, illegal fortune to be made in water. (As a former slave who works rather too hard to enrich himself and burnish his reputation, he’s aptly named, for ampliatus means “to widen,” “to enlarge,” or “to glorify”.) He quickly recognizes that Attilius will oppose him and takes steps to have him removed. Nobody will be surprised to hear that Ampliatus has a daughter, Corelia, whose beauty, sensitivity, and generous heart smite the stoic engineer between the eyes. Harris does tweak that cliché, though, loosening up his priggish protagonist as the novel proceeds, a nice touch. But Vesuvius, naturally, will have the last word over all petty, human affairs, which makes a normal engineering project a very tense activity.

Harris has also researched his ground, to great effect. The houses feel lived in, the streets vibrant, and, important to a story like this, the engineering worthy of awe. I learned that the aqueduct builders sloped their pipelines a small, precise distance every hundred yards–roughly, the thickness of a human finger. Any less, and the water remained stagnant; any more, and the current destroyed the masonry. What a metaphor for the business of state or survival–a hair’s breadth off, and life ends, history changes.

Like An Officer and a Spy, Harris’s superb novel about the Dreyfus Affair (reviewed March 9), Pompeii hews to events as they happened, yet still astonishes. If you read historical thrillers sparingly and prefer a deeper, more complex novel, try An Officer and a Spy first. But both will reward you.

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

A City Burned

26 Monday Jan 2015

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Review: Shall We Not Revenge, by D. M. Pirrone
Allium, 2014. 323 pp. $17

For most Chicagoans, the winter of 1872 means untold hardship. The Great Fire has ravaged the city, destroying thousands of homes and workplaces, and the shantytowns that spring up to house the destitute and jobless offer no comforts or hope. People do what they must to stay warm in bitter cold, make it through another day, and keep their families together. Relief is paltry and slow, but criminals may be found everywhere. Gang bosses know where there’s money to be made, often thanks to corrupt police, who look the other way for a cut of the take.

Chicagoans of all classes flee from the Great Fire. From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 28 October 1871. (Courtesy Chicago Historical Society)

Chicagoans of all classes flee from the Great Fire. From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 28 October 1871. (Courtesy Chicago Historical Society)

It’s in this brutal, gritty atmosphere that someone has killed a rabbi in his synagogue, bashing in his head with one silver menorah and stealing another. Was the motive robbery? The rabbi was much loved in his struggling neighborhood for good works, so it’s unlikely that anyone held a grudge. Yet he was also engaged in secret activities that no one wishes to talk about.

Newly appointed detective Frank Hanley must solve the case, and he faces long odds. Even beyond the native distrust city residents have for Chicago’s finest or the immigrant population’s belief that police are oppressors, to the Jews mourning their beloved leader, Hanley’s an outsider, an Irish Catholic who couldn’t possibly understand their ways or respect them.

From this premise, Pirrone (a pseudonym) crafts an engrossing story that keeps twisting this way and that until the very end. It includes a growing attraction between Hanley and Rivka Kelmansky, the late rabbi’s daughter, who helps him gather clues and navigate the cultural shoals that threaten to swamp the investigation at every turn. I like how the author frames Jewish rituals and customs from Hanley’s perspective, and how his misperceptions of them sometimes lead him to the wrong conclusions. I also like how she describes the city, the poor, modern police procedure in its infant days, and the underworld that so often evades justice. The sense of time and place is so strong that it almost carries the narrative by itself.

 

He sighed and trudged down the sidewalk. The cold kept the planks from sinking into the frozen mud beneath and dampened the pervasive odors of moist lumber and rotting vegetables. The light was thin and gray, like the remnants of snow on the ground, and flurries swirled in the air. Not enough to cover the dirty snow-crust and muck, unfortunately. . . . He loathed winter . . . [e]specially now, with the city’s scorched bones still bared to the sky and the taste of smoke in the air.

What I disliked was how the author writes her characters. With few exceptions, they’re either all good or rotten to the core. Hanley in particular feels too good to be true, not least his rapid recovery from severe injuries. He’s always on the right side, without prejudices, a good boy who even washes the dinner dishes and treats all women with respect. His only flaw is a bad temper, but what o’ that? Likewise, his immediate boss has unshakable trust in Frank–a neophyte–which leads to interventions that feel contrived, at times. More nuanced portrayals would have given Pirrone even more tension than she achieves.

Her prose, vivid though it is in description, falters at emotional moments. Too often, the narrative tells what the characters feel, sometimes even to repeat what they’ve already shown.

That said, I enjoyed Shall We Not Revenge for the story and the setting, a historical background that I’d never read about.

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

Rottenness in the New Jerusalem

17 Monday Nov 2014

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William Hogarth, “The Rake’s Progress,” plate 3, “The Tavern Scene.” Black-and-white image courtesy of The Gutenberg Project.

Review: The Anatomy of Ghosts, by Andrew W. Taylor

Hyperion, 2011. 412 pp. $25.

By all accounts, late eighteenth-century English towns were foul-smelling sinkholes, where physical and moral corruption bred like flies in drawing rooms and hovels alike. Andrew Taylor has imagined a college at Cambridge, named Jerusalem, a most unholy nest that stinks to high heaven, crowded with power-seekers, hypocrites, and carousing young gentlemen of high birth and low morals.

The latest malodorous scandal concerns a young undergraduate, Frank Oldershaw, who has had a nervous breakdown because, he says, he saw the ghost of a woman who drowned herself. Ghosts and their sightings may be as common as mud among the lower orders, but Frank Oldershaw is an aristocrat, and “self-murder,” as it is called, is so reprehensible a crime that nobody of breeding speaks of it.

Consequently, Frank’s widowed mother, Lady Anne Oldershaw desires to restore her son’s health and reputation; like any doting parent, she doesn’t know (or prefers not to know) that her boy witnessed his vision following an appalling debauch, gross even by Jerusalem College standards. To investigate, Lady Anne hires John Holdsworth, a bookseller who has achieved small notoriety for a book he wrote debunking ghosts as fictions of the superstitious and those who would prey on them.

What Holdsworth finds, and, more importantly, how he goes about it, make compelling reading. Without giving too much away, it’s enough to say that he has strong personal motives to lay this or any ghost, and that specters of all sorts trouble the characters of this tale. Of course, Holdsworth’s ability to gather and sift evidence make him a first-class detective. But his perceptions of human behavior, and how self-interest shapes how we see ourselves and others, are what truly set him apart from everyone he meets. His loneliness in insight and the implicit divisions in a rigid class system complicate his efforts to understand the Oldershaw case and himself.

Holdershaw’s growth as a character adds an extra, unusual dimension to an excellent mystery, told with gusto, deftness, and natural command of a historical scene. I read few historical mysteries, or even mysteries in general, but I recommend this one.