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Land, Fens, Love: Call Upon the Water

14 Monday Oct 2019

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Review: Call Upon the Water, by Stella Tillyard
Atria, 2019. 269 pp. $26

Summoned to England in 1649 to help oversee the draining and development of wetlands called the Great Level, Jan Brunt, a Dutch engineer, seeks professional advancement. A reserved, taciturn man who outwardly reveals little other than his seriousness of purpose, within, he harbors great passion for the natural world he would master. Sharp-eyed and introspective, Jan follows currents of thought like the watercourses he strives to control, both of which lead him to startling places. Most significantly, his ramblings bring him to Eliza, a reactive, passionate woman of the fens where he measures and surveys. Such people, according to Jan’s informants, are half-savage and of no account. But Eliza and Jan begin an affair that prompts him to question much of what he thought he knew of life.

From this tantalizing premise, Tillyard weaves a narrative at once physical and metaphysical, using the most basic elements, water and land. With an elegant simplicity I admire, Call Upon the Water explores what land and water mean, how will and freedom struggle against natural and human-made obstacles, and what that implies for love between two people of very different worlds and outlooks. Consequently, Tillyard offers a profound look into our essential surroundings, which usually pass unnoticed because they’re constantly within sight. Her novel gradually takes you over, giving you much to ponder, a magic that begins with her deceptively simple prose:

I am a Dutchman and an islander. Water and the sky are safe to me as my mother’s skirts. I know an empty silence and a full silence. Stand still in a full silence and it’s loud with noises. A heron takes flight; he creaks like a ship in sail. Ducks scuffle in the reeds. I hear the beat of wings, the movement of creatures in the grass, water rippling, and the wind that accompanies me everywhere, sighing and roaring. Nature, that seems so quiet, pours out its songs. Even in the darkness there is a velvet purr of sound, of moles underground and field mice above.

Tillyard uses similar pared-down, evocative language to establish the way things work in the 1650s, whether she’s recounting Jan’s surveying procedures, describing the harbor of Nieuw Amsterdam (which figures in the story), or narrating how indentured servants live in North America. These vivid pictures show Tillyard’s grasp of social history, and a deep one it is. What a shame, then, that the jacket flap reduces this rich, complex portrait to a bland recitation that goes out of its way to spoil the story, recounting the action up until about the last thirty pages. If you read Call Upon the Water — and there are good reasons to do so — do not, repeat, not look at the jacket flap.

Now that I’ve said that, I confess I wound up liking the book less than I thought I would. That’s partly because the storytelling jumps around from the Great Level to Nieuw Amsterdam and elsewhere like a restless traveler. It’s as though Tillyard has set her sights on a circular narrative with two beginnings that eventually meet, and she’s invested too much in this device to back away from it. But if we’re meant to be surprised on reaching that long-awaited junction, the resulting aha! doesn’t justify the heavy lifting required to get there. Similarly, when Jan realizes he loves Eliza, a shift in narrative perspective calls undue attention to itself, an affectation particularly unnecessary, since the words already convey how smitten he is. Tillyard doesn’t need artifice to tell this, or any other, story.

Conversely, she seems oddly unwilling to clarify certain aspects of her narrative, perhaps because she fears to show or tell too much, another form of artifice. Still, I want to know why Eliza behaves in certain ways, or what she sees in Jan, worthy though he is; yet, for much of the novel, she’s a shadow figure. When her voice finally appears toward the end, it’s a shock, more so because I don’t find her entirely credible. To cite one example, I like her feminism, which she sums up as, “No man should think because I am a woman and a slighter shaped, that my eyes and my thoughts are smaller than theirs. That is a mistake easy to fall into, as others have done.”

But I don’t know how she comes to this attitude, which surely begs for explanation, especially in 1650. Nor do I understand how Jan and Eliza manage to ignore conflicts inherent in their relationship—not that they have to talk them through, but they should at least recognize that they’re there. All you know is that Eliza claims a preternatural ability to house deep or inconvenient feelings in well-contained, separate compartments. I’m not convinced.

Despite these reservations though, I can recommend Call Upon the Water as a portrayal of life seldom seen, with much to reflect on, told in marvelous prose. For many, that will be more than enough.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher, in return for an honest review.

Resurrecting Oz: Finding Dorothy

30 Monday Sep 2019

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Review: Finding Dorothy, by Elizabeth Letts
Ballantine, 2019. 351 pp. $28

In October 1938, Maud Baum has a mission to undertake in Hollywood, and since she’s seventy-eight, she presents an odd picture to security guards and receptionists. But those who underestimate Maud do so at their peril, for not only has she learned a thing or two in her long life about effecting change, her mother was a charismatic activist for feminist causes, especially suffrage. More important to the reason Maud lays siege to M-G-M, she’s L. Frank Baum’s widow — he, who penned the book whose film version is in production, The Wizard of Oz.

And as she begins her quest, this is what she sees:

It was a city within a city, a textile mill to weave the gossamer of fantasy on looping looms of celluloid. From the flashing needles of the tailors in the costume shop to the zoo where the animals were trained, from the matzo ball soup in the commissary to the blinding-white offices in the brand-new Thalberg executive building, an army of people — composers and musicians, technicians and tinsmiths, directors and actors — spun thread into gold. Once upon a time, dreams were made by hand, but now they were mass-produced. These forty-four acres were their assembly line.

Maud wants to be sure that this factory won’t destroy the work into which her late husband put his heart and soul — and, as the reader eventually learns, constituted his only professional success in a lifetime filled with disappointments. And what should Maud find when she visits the M-G-M soundstage, but a girl too old to play Dorothy singing a song about a rainbow? This not only does damage to her beloved husband’s opus, it will, Maud believes, betray the millions of children who love the original.

From this ingenious premise comes an intriguing, occasionally uneven but ultimately satisfying novel, written with wisdom and a sure hand. Letts splits her narrative in two, one half for the movie in production, and the other, for Maud’s childhood and subsequent marriage to Frank. Throughout, the author delivers a strong feminist message, which comes to the fore when she crashes the studio. Those scenes focus on Judy Garland, still only fifteen when the filming starts, and oppressed from all sides. She’s got a horrible mother who treats her like a dollar sign; an assistant producer who molests her; a commissary that, on studio orders, won’t let her eat anything but cottage cheese and lettuce, for fear she will grow and then really look too old for the part; and diet pills she must take, which give her insomnia, for which she takes another set of pills.

Publicity photo of Judy Garland for the 1939 film (as a publicity photo, with no recognized photographer and originally intended for wide distribution, such images are widely considered public domain; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

But Judy also has Maud, though she doesn’t realize it yet, because that kind old lady knows a victim when she sees one and can’t walk away. Maud’s license to be a gadfly lacks the necessary signatures, and the executives running this horror show periodically try to shut her out. Why, then, does she continue, and how does she manage to?

The key lies in Maud’s past, invariably bound up with the original models for Dorothy, Auntie Em, the Emerald City, the Wizard, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and, yes, Toto too. To Maud, these autobiographical bits mean much more than a past life, representing intense emotional experiences. Though I prefer the studio narrative, with credible portrayals of Yip Harburg, the lyricist, and Louis B. Mayer, the second m in M-G-M, Letts does well to show why Maud looks after Judy and refuses to take no for an answer. Also, though not an Oz aficionado, and as someone who likes the book better than the movie, I still appreciate the revelations about Baum’s sources for his characters, especially because Letts resists the temptation to overplay them. What could have been a wink-wink-nudge-nudge routine feels more natural and earned.

I wish Letts had shown more and told less, and that the prose rose more often to the level quoted above. Also, I don’t quite believe certain plot points, especially how easily Maud penetrates the studio, though I accept Letts’s assertion that she has stuck strictly to the historical record, which is pretty remarkable in itself, since history doesn’t always make good fiction. (One nit about the afterword: I wish she’d mentioned Yip Harburg’s most famous other songs, like “April in Paris,” “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” or “Paper Moon,” not just his other musical, about Amelia Bloomer.) Even so, I salute Finding Dorothy, which tells an unusual, worthwhile story.

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

Past Lives: Old Baggage

09 Monday Sep 2019

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Review: Old Baggage, by Lissa Evans
Harper, 2018. 310 pp. $16

Matilda Simpkin lives in a glorious, thrilling past as an activist for women’s suffrage, who, before the First World War, rubbed elbows with the Pankhursts and threw elbows at policemen trying to subdue her. But it’s now 1928, and London life has dulled for Mattie. She lectures from time to time on the old days, for she has priceless lantern slides of the movement and can talk about what it was like to be imprisoned at Holloway, the infamous jail where suffragists were tortured, out of the public eye. An elegant, passionate, witty speaker, she’s quick on her feet and quicker to remind her audiences that women under thirty still can’t vote in Britain, nor those of age who lack the property qualifications. So Mattie still has her cause, her sisters in need, and the energy to lend a hand.

Annie Kenney, left, and Christabel Pankhurst, founders of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Manchester, ca. 1908 (photo courtesy Hastings Press via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But nobody’s paying attention, really, and that’s Mattie’s problem. Not only has her generation lost its fire; she needs to feel listened to, be the center of attention, to mentor others. However, she can be too quick to offer solutions to their problems and too slow to hear their silent plea simply for an understanding ear; and her urge to fix people, whom she sees as acolytes, can make her impossible. She assumes that those who turn away must be complacent or scared of risk, never dreaming that she herself scares them, or that the way she comes across subverts her efforts. In other words, Mattie Simpkin is a good-hearted, committed narcissist, and though such people often make waves, they don’t always pay attention to those who fear drowning in them.

Picture, then, her attempt to teach the younger generation. She forms a girls’ club called the Amazons, which meets weekly near her home on Hampstead Heath, for intellectual and physical exercise, learning and cooperative games. Who’d bother to join a club run by a windbag feminist of yesteryear? Dozens, as it turns out, a victory that Mattie accepts as a matter of course, and she thrives in her role. Despite her pedantry and occasional lack of sensitivity, both of which can be hilarious, she has much to teach, as relevant now as it was then: As a girl, you’re a real person, and you can make a difference. Her students aren’t always sure what this means, but most like the sound of it, and things go fine until a particular girl shows up, one who evokes the past. On such small incidents, worlds turn.

As you find out only at the end, Evans’s previous novel, Crooked Hearts, has a tangential connection to Old Baggage. I liked Crooked Hearts, but I like the current book better. It’s more serious yet funnier at once, which sounds odd until you notice that the tone here lacks all consciousness of satire, and the characters feel deeper. They have no sense that anyone should laugh at them, because they believe what they’re doing is utterly important. But our heroine needs a sidekick, one who’s more tuned in, and Florrie Lee (called The Flea), fills the role perfectly. The women are sparring partners in both heart and in politics, and though there’s social commentary aplenty, I never think it’s over the top or pasted on. It’s part of the action.

But it’s Mattie who drives the book, eccentric, principled, and flawed. As one of her less enthusiastic charges in the Amazons observes:

Miss Simpkin… had a face as readable as a penny newspaper, enthusiasm and exasperation, encouragement and the odd gust of rage chasing across her features. ‘Thar she blows!’ some of the bolder girls would whisper, as Mattie sounded off about Mussolini, or dogs with docked tails, or vegetarians.… Miss Simpkin was peculiar. Normal people stayed indoors when it rained, and thought that nice stockings were important; they didn’t sing in public, they didn’t pick up frogs and tell you about Greek plays.

Besides the sense of humor visible on almost every page, Evans has a knack for capturing historical ages and scraping the sepia off them. She understands politics and social movements from the inside and how they look from the outside. Likewise, the difficulties Mattie faces in her quest to educate the young reveal obstacles inside her and in others, so that her inner narrative connects to the outer, seamlessly accomplished.

Old Baggage is a delightful, moving book, and I recommend it.

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

The Future’s a Riddle: The Almanack

29 Monday Jul 2019

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Review: The Almanack, by Martine Bailey
Severn, 2019. 328 pp. $29

In midsummer 1752, Londoner Tabitha Hart accepts a rendezvous at an inn with a well-to-do gentleman who promises to be an easy mark, only to waken and realize she’s the one fleeced. The loss of her money, jewels, and clothes proves more than a usual setback in the sex-and-petty-theft trade, for Tabitha was planning to bring her mother funds she desperately needs, for herself and the care of Tabitha’s out-of-wedlock daughter, Bess. Worse, when the destitute, half-dressed Tabitha reaches her mother’s cottage in the village of Netherslea, to her shock, her mother’s recent letters pleading for help prove all too prophetic. Mrs. Hart has drowned in the river, a death her daughter refuses to credit, especially given the constable’s explanation, that the old lady’s mind had grown infirm, and she didn’t know where she was going half the time.

Consequently, much as Tabitha longs to return to London, she must restore her mother’s reputation — there are whispers of suicide — and see justice done. Her only clue is her mother’s almanack, in which appear warnings about a certain D, said to be untrustworthy and dangerous. However, Tabitha has few illusions about remaining in her native village, where her reputation is mud, and the sanctimonious, vindictive Parson Dilks would like nothing better than to drive her away. He applies pressure to take the cottage away, because it was granted to her mother as the village “searcher,” the one who laid out dead bodies, inspected them for cause of death, and wrote the results in parish records. Through the intercession of more kindly souls, Tabitha is allowed to inherit her mother’s position, and therefore the cottage, but only temporarily, and Dilks finds other ways to persecute her.

A book of incantations, 1825, from the library of John Harries (d. 1839), a Welsh astrologer and medical practitioner (courtesy National Library of Wales, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Complicating the picture is Nat Starling, a swaggering lush who scratches out a living writing scurrilous stories about true crime and debauchery. Naturally, he falls for Tabitha’s beauty and intelligence right away, whereas he’s just the sort of man who has always been poison to her, which is why she feels drawn to him as well. But she won’t give him what he wants unless and until he helps her solve the mystery about her mother, which he seems to wish to do anyway, having been a friend of hers. But, as with everyone else in Netherslea, Tabitha can’t be sure of Nat, and his dissolute habits raise further doubts.

The Almanack offers a clever mystery, with twists and turns (and “no — and furthermore”) aplenty. Bailey’s a fine storyteller, but she’s done more than build a clockwork plot that keeps striking an odd hour, serving to heighten the tension. Rather, she’s re-created the lore of village life, with its superstitions, back-biting, and feast of gossip. She’s also paid due tribute to feminism, as Tabitha bitterly resents the double standard that calls her a whore but allows men license to do what they wish, further granting them credibility as witnesses that she can never hope to earn.

This intricate homespun tapestry begins with active description, as with Tabitha’s first glimpse of Netherslea on her return:

The riverside path was deserted that morning; from the golden motes in the air, she guessed most folk must be hay-making. Crossing a well-remembered meadow, she drank at an icy brook and breakfasted on bilberries fresh from the earth; the taste of them, tartly sweet, was fresher than any food she had eaten in years. Thereafter her way grew easy and she passed the succeeding miles serenely. She had forgotten the lushness of the Cheshire sward in midsummer; the murmur of insects on the wing, the wildflowers that bedizened her path. Idly she picked meadowsweet, wild rose and ragged robin, twining them into a chain and then winding it in a circlet through her hair.

Bailey takes her carefully delineated ambience one step further. Having researched the eighteenth-century passion for almanacks, which were recycled predictions published yearly and simply plugged into different dates, she makes excellent use of them here. Not only does the infamous D deliver on the ghoulish prognostications in the local almanack, Bailey introduces each of her short chapters with riddles in verse, which contemporary almanacks contained, and which were devoured avidly. The fifty riddles Bailey has chosen — most anonymous, but a few credited to Jonathan Swift, among other notables — predict some aspect of the episode to come. Since the mystery itself is a riddle, and solved through one, everything connects. And that’s part of the delight in The Almanack, which, despite an occasional cliché of character, makes a satisfying tale.

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

A Feminist in the Four Hundred: A Well Behaved Woman

25 Monday Mar 2019

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Review: A Well Behaved Woman, by Therese Anne Fowler
St. Martins, 2018. 392 pp. $28

In 1874, Miss Alva Smith, Southern belle of good name but a lost cotton fortune, puts herself on the New York marriage market, much the way gambler with a limited stake visits a casino. She snags William K. Vanderbilt, who must be counted quite a catch, having more money than even he knows how to spend. But it’s not love or even physical attraction that motivates her, only the financial considerations that will save her three sisters, their invalid father, and herself from destitution, and William’s apparent liking for her. Bad idea, you say? Marry in haste, repent at leisure?

Alva Vanderbilt, duly attired for her costume ball in March 1883 (courtesy nyhistory.org via Wikimedia Commons)

Well, yes, and as a Vanderbilt, there’s plenty of leisure around, about two hundred pages’ worth, in this case. By that time, Alva has learned a thing or two about her husband and the high society she was so eager to join. The first lessons are brutal. William’s notion of sex is lift the nightgown, push hard, grunt, roll off, and return to his own room. The day their first child is born, he gives Alva an extravagantly expensive bauble “for her trouble,” and goes off to inspect champion horseflesh for purchase. After all, as he says, he has nothing better to do.

Alva shouldn’t be too surprised. As the impecunious Miss Smith pursuing William in the dining room of an upper-class watering hole, she senses that she herself might as well have been a horse:

The other marriageable girls were too lovely, all of them, those rose-milk complexions and hourglass waists and silks that gleamed like water in sunlight. The Greenbrier resort’s dining room was filled with such girls, there in the company of clever mothers whispering instructions on the most flattering angle for teacup and wrist, and sit straighter, smile brightly, glance coyly — lashes down. The young men, who were outnumbered three to one, wore crisp white collars and linen coats and watched and smiled and nodded like eager buyers at a Thoroughbred market.

Yet, as Fowler painstakingly reveals, the results of this successful husband hunting aren’t all bad. Alva enjoys many of the things William’s money buys — physical comfort, fine clothes and jewels, beautiful homes that she helps design (and for which she has a gift), protection from life’s hazards. The Gilded Age comes alive in these pages, with its shockingly conscienceless opulence while hunger and hardship stalk New York; the social cabals involving who can snub whom and feel righteous about it; and the assumption, embraced by both sexes, that women are ornaments, hearth warmers, and social arbiters but never, ever thinking, independent-minded people with their own inner lives or interests. I like how Fowler’s drawn the two major characters, and though I can’t say I like William, I do get that he feels a dynastic weight on his shoulders and acts accordingly. Unfortunately, others suffer from his self-inflicted wound, because he’s a man incapable of reflection or questioning his prerogatives.

You know that Alva’s different from her cohort, that within her lurks a social reformer, a sympathetic person, perhaps even a democrat, and the narrative implies that had the field been open to her, she could have trained as an architect. The first scene of A Well Behaved Woman shows Miss Smith touring a tenement with seven other upper-class ladies and displaying a singularly receptive, empathic reaction. I love this scene, and Fowler’s clever to introduce Alva that way. Two hundred pages is a long time to wait for consciousness, and the author is giving the reader something to hold onto during the interim.

But I’m not sure the tactic succeeds. I understand Fowler’s commitment to a slow burn, because Alva has been taught all her life that an outwardly brilliant marriage is all any woman could (or should) want. I agree that her inchoate dreams for wider horizons shouldn’t lead her in another direction too soon or too easily. Further, the payoff, when it finally comes, does satisfy, and Alva’s subsequent actions justify the author’s contention that this socialite was an ardent, practicing feminist.

That said, however, it’s another question whether you actually care about Alva’s intricate, time-consuming machinations to make Caroline Astor accept the Vanderbilts as social equals. No doubt it’s true to life, but, as Alva’s African-American maid gently suggests, there’s prejudice, and then there’s prejudice. Moreover, Fowler proves her case early on that William K. Vanderbilt, like other men of his class, is selfish, tyrannical, and completely deluded as to the relationship between wealth and character. Piling on the evidence adds nothing new.
Consequently, whether A Well Behaved Woman will please you depends on your patience for the Gilded Age and its sins. It’s a well-written book, and Alva’s a worthy character, but I wonder whether Fowler could have told her story more effectively.

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

A Serious Yarn: The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock

21 Monday Jan 2019

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Review: The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, by Imogen Hermes Gowar
HarperCollins, 2018. 484 pp. $29

It’s 1785, and Jonah Hancock, a Deptford shipping merchant of some means, receives unwelcome news: The captain of one of three ships he owns has sold it and its cargo to bring back a dead, preserved mermaid. Hancock doesn’t know what to do with his new treasure, and the likely financial loss terrifies him, even though he’s solvent. Playing to his fears, his controlling, self-absorbed sister accuses him of squandering the fortune their extended family (read: her children) depends on and will make their name a laughingstock. As a childless widower, you see, he’s got no one else to support, but, more to the point, Jonah has always tried to appease his sister, a thankless, impossible task. He’s sorely in want of backbone or spirit of adventure, but he doesn’t know where to find them—or even whether it’s advisable to look.

This illustration of P.T. Barnum’s alleged “Feejee Mermaid” first appeared in the New York Herald in 1842 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Nevertheless, to recoup his expenses, he puts the mermaid on display and creates a sensation. The money he receives from gawkers willing to pay for the privilege helps soothe his worries. More importantly, the exposure widens his social world, for the bawdy house that he’s licensed to show his mermaid is frequented by the rich and famous — and those who sell themselves to them. Crucial to the proceedings, the good Mr. Hancock, though scandalized at what he sees, meets the beautiful, accomplished courtesan Angelica Neal. Since the title tells you that Jonah will marry, she’s the likeliest candidate, if only because he meets nobody else.

What a risky authorial gambit, yielding up a crucial plot point, daring the reader to put the book down. But Gowar is more than equal to the challenge she sets herself, for how the two characters overcome first impressions makes for quite a story, with much “no — and furthermore” to block their way. Angelica, accustomed to baubles, flash, and excitement, shouldn’t be interested in Jonah for anything other than his money, and yet there’s more at work than that. Likewise, though Jonah has never met an obstacle he can’t run away from, he has nevertheless mourned his late wife and infant son for fifteen years, and you sense courage and will gathering under his scraggly powdered wig.

Reading The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock reminds me of a modern-day Henry Fielding, complete with intricate plot, ribaldry, and social commentary. So it is that Hancock observes titled members of Parliament at the bawdy house, who speak in “baby-talk and garbled vowels as the signallers of good breeding”:

Since he has spent two score years outside the society of genteel Whigs, he must be forgiven for hearing their speech as a cacophony of pantomime sneezes; they pronounce the first syllable with great energy, and trail off into a drawl as if between a word’s first letter and its last they have lost all conviction in what they are saying. He is aware — and ashamed of — his dislike for them; he is a Tory through and through, as his father was before him. It is the logical, the patriotic, the honest choice. He has never until this moment felt in any means awkward about it.

But the comic moments aside, there’s much serious matter here. Gowar talks about the way men imprison women for their own use — literally or figuratively — so she brings you inside the brothel, showing the courtesan’s (and madam’s) training and mindset, commercial cruelty, and their hirelings’ poignant sacrifice. In this novel, it seems that every woman in London is for sale, in one way or another, and the mermaid symbolizes this painful fact. The unlikely romance between the straight-laced Jonah and the calculating, brittle Angelica works beautifully, I think; the two characters complement one another in ways they could never have imagined. I also note the choice of names: Jonah, the unwilling prophet who has more to teach than he knows, and Angelica, who discovers, to her surprise, that she possesses goodness and simplicity.

The jacket flap mentions the theme of race, but Gowar spends little time on it, and her attempt to extend the imprisonment metaphor in that direction, though literally apt—enslavement, after all—feels like a letdown because she doesn’t develop it enough. Did a previous, doubtless longer, version of the manuscript dwell on it more deeply? As it is, the theme seems more a point of philosophy than essential to the story, rather like a room to a large house that has been closed off. But that’s a minor complaint about a very fine book — a debut novel, in fact.

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

Are We Downhearted?: Dear Mrs. Bird

31 Monday Dec 2018

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Review: Dear Mrs. Bird, by AJ Pearce
Scribner, 2018. 281 pp. $26

Emmeline Lake has always wanted to be a journalist, and since it’s 1940, and London is being bombed almost nightly, how better to do her bit than as an intrepid reporter? She already volunteers for the Auxiliary Fire Service, answering telephone calls during Luftwaffe raids. But though she enjoys the work and the camaraderie, Emmy believes she has more to her and more to give. So when she sees an ad from what she thinks is the London Evening Chronicle for an assistant, she applies right away. Her friend Marigold, known as Bunty — don’t ask why; this is England — encourages her to celebrate the start of a sparkling career in reportage. Emmy, the optimistic, hopeful sort, eats it up, and pretty soon, everybody who knows her is congratulating her on her big break into journalism.

Aldwych Underground station used as an air-raid shelter, 1940 (courtesy Imperial War Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons)

It never occurs to Emmy that, as a junior assistant, she’s more likely to find her typing skills an asset than creative get-up-and-go. Nor does the way she practically walks into the job for the asking set off any alarm bells. Rather, she makes the unhappy discovery that she’s on a different floor from the Evening Chronicle, and it might as well be the moon. Emmy has gotten herself a job as typist to the redoubtable Mrs. Henrietta Bird, the Dear Abby of Woman’s Friend magazine, though a more apt description might be Dear Queen of Hearts. Mrs. Bird doesn’t exactly say, “Off with her head!” But she does shout, and she refuses to answer, or even read, any letter that has the least bit of Unpleasantness in it. The few replies she writes suggest that her empathy, if she ever had any, was jellied in aspic sometime around 1911. There may be a war on, and women are asked to bear many burdens of which men know nothing, all while remaining completely unflappable, cheerful, and physically attractive. But Mrs. Bird knows nothing of this and would rather not hear about it.

Emmy cares, however, and knows how to respond, or thinks she does. And since her boss is often out, that leaves the chance open for mischief, or, as Emmy sees it, offering help to those in need. I’ll leave you to guess what happens.

Pearce captures a certain spirit of the time, an honest, cheery, keep-your-chin-up mood for which beleaguered Londoners enduring the Blitz became famous. Lissa Evans, for one, has written about the other side of that spectrum, those who pretended selflessness or patriotism but were really on the take. Yet there’s no doubt that young women like Emmy existed, and if part of Dear Mrs. Bird seems fanciful, it’s also irresistibly charming:

Today, London was operating under a low and dreary grey sky, the sort that looked like a giant boy had flung off his school jumper and accidentally covered up the West End. Braving the cold, I was wearing a smart blue single-breasted serge suit, my very best shoes, and a little black tilt hat that I had borrowed from Bunty. I hoped I might look both businesslike and alert. The sort of person who could sniff out a scoop and get the measure of it in a moment. The sort of person who is not feeling as if her heart might positively explode.

Humor’s the key to this novel, and I love Pearce’s touch. For instance, of the drinks cabinet in Emmy and Bunty’s flat, the women have decided that if the Germans invaded and broke in, “we would push it down the stairs at them. The full extent of the British Empire was featured in a rather confident orange and we thought that would make them quite wonderfully cross.”

But these people also know pain and hardship as their city’s being blown to bits. Dear Mrs. Bird contains touching moments when war intrudes, and it’s impossible — undesirable — to keep a stiff upper lip. In such a strained atmosphere, estrangements are sometimes inevitable, and Pearce never lets her heroine sail through life. With the bombs falling, that would be ridiculous. The ending does seem a bit contrived, but it’s also funny, and to object would be churlish. Dear Mrs. Bird is a delightful book.

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

Her Story: The Silence of the Girls

10 Monday Dec 2018

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Review: The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker
Doubleday, 2018. 291 pp. $28

Readers familiar with the Trojan War myths will recognize the name Briseis as belonging to the woman captured by Achilles and taken by Agamemnon, an insult that results in a fateful quarrel. Achilles sulks, and in his absence from the battlefield, the Greeks suffer reversals, the most serious of which is Patroclus’s death. In the traditional telling, the woman herself is a thing, a bauble to be claimed, hardly worth mentioning except the trouble she causes.

But in this beautifully imagined, finely wrought novel, Briseis has her say. And when she does, she speaks for all women, those of Troy and elsewhere, of queens like herself and commoners. As she remarks with incisive bitterness, when bards craft the songs of great deeds and heroes, they don’t mention the truth of conquest, “the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls.” Needless to say, neither Briseis nor her sisters in captivity cause any trouble, but even the presumption that they do suggests the tremendous power that men have — to tell the story of their battles, as though those were the only ones fought, or theirs the only story.

Achilles surrenders Briseis to Agamemnon, first-century fresco from Pompeii (courtesy Naples National Archeological Museum, via Wikimedia Commons)

Utterly engrossing from its first words, The Silence of the Girls begins with Achilles laying siege to Briseis’s home city, Lyrnessus. She hears his voice, his war cry, before she even sees him, and what will happen is never in doubt. After the battle comes the looting:

Gangs of men were dragging heavy loads out of the buildings – carved furniture, bales of rich cloth, tapestries, armour, tripods, cooking cauldrons, barrels of wine and grain. Now and then, the men would sit down and rest, some on the ground, some on the chairs and beds they’d been carrying. They were all swigging wine straight from the jug, wiping their mouths on the backs of their bloodstained hands, getting steadily and determinedly drunk. And more and more often, as the sky started to fade, they gazed up at the slit windows of the citadel where they knew the women would be hiding.. . . For hours, I watched them strip houses and temples of wealth that generations of my people had worked hard to create, and they were so good at it, so practised. . . . And then they turned their attention to us.

As this description suggests, Barker writes as if she’s actually seen everything that goes on, known all these mythical characters from personal experience. Achilles, a killing machine of great physical beauty but no heart save for love of Patroclus, his childhood friend, makes a disturbingly believable portrait. He’s difficult to sympathize with, considering his ego, merciless outlook, and selfishness, yet you also understand how he’s never grown up — and even realizes it, a little. Barker astutely wonders what it must have been like for Achilles to have a goddess for a mother, and what that must have done to his psyche. Patroclus is much kinder; he almost sees Briseis as a person — almost. Agamemnon’s a loser, a bully said not to risk his skin in battle, and as such, fears that others will see his weakness.

The protagonist, meanwhile, refuses to accept her fate, as Patroclus counsels her to do in her first hours as a slave. Her struggles to cope with how it feels to be unseen, unheard, raped nightly by the man who killed her brothers, knowing that however bad her life is, it could be worse — Achilles could tire of her and hand her to his men — speak loudly. It’s her story, all right, and she makes the most of it. Barker does follow the myth, but there are so many unexpected moments within that framework that nothing feels predictable.

In that, I’m reminded of my favorite Trojan War novels, The War at Troy, by Lindsay Clarke, and The Songs of the Kings, by Barry Unsworth. But I think Barker goes one better; it’s my favorite of hers since Regeneration. Neither Clarke nor Unsworth would have allowed the few anachronisms in which Barker indulges — a fist pump, Briseis’s knowledge that rats and plague go together, and, most important (and pervasive), modern British slang. Some readers will be put off by that, and at first, it pushes you out of the narrative — a definite no-no — but these soldiers talk like soldiers, and they seem entirely credible.

The Silence of the Girls may not be perfect, but it’s pretty damn close.

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

Human Flaws Exposed: Dazzle Patterns

12 Monday Nov 2018

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Review: Dazzle Patterns, by Allison Watt
Freehand, 2018. 339 pp. $22

Clare Holmes works in a glassworks in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917, a port city that buzzes with wartime traffic. Living in the big town instead of on her parents’ farm has provoked a constant, simmering conflict with Clare’s controlling mother, Ada. But Clare has plans that Ada would never dream of. The young woman is saving up for her passage to France so that she can become a Red Cross nurse and be near her soldier fiancé, Leo.

However, when a ship blows up in the harbor, the blast destroys the glassworks and a swath of town, leaving many dead. The consequences for Clare are severe and cascading. Not only does she lose an eye, which means Ada grabs her and brings her home; Clare worries that Leo won’t want her anymore; and, worse, the post-traumatic stresses sap her desire to live. Her friends hold out hope that she’ll be able to return to the glassworks, but her job there involved checking the product for flaws, and the boss isn’t the only one who doubts she can manage that with only one eye. It’s a nice twist, the flaw-checker who feels — and is — damaged herself. And she becomes so aware of her imperfection that she can hardly get out of bed, let alone function.

But Clare is nothing if not independent-minded, and Watt has put her protagonist’s inner life on vivid display. Overcoming her disability literally means Clare has to develop another way to see the world in perspective; and when you read that she takes up drawing, the metaphor gains breadth. But her adaptation of course involves how she sees herself, and this is my favorite aspect of Dazzle Patterns. Where once Clare defined the future as being Leo’s wife, or, more immediately, staying out of Ada’s clutches and becoming a nurse, she now takes a larger view. It’s as if Clare’s loss and necessary compensation for it have let her grow in unforeseeable ways, to extend the metaphor even further.

Watt’s at her best when the narrative stays in Halifax. She portrays the home front and all its fears and prejudices with a sure hand, as well as the boarding house Clare lives in, the glassworks, and the horrific aftermath of the explosion. Here’s the destruction recounted through the eyes of Fred, a glassblower whom Clare later befriends:

Walking back to his rooming house Fred saw houses fallen in upon themselves, charred like abandoned bonfires, or burnt completely away, only the chimneys flooded with black puddles of ash and snow. Standing houses stared blank-eyed, all their windows gone. Telephone poles tilted. On the street, a breadbox, a school bag, a woman’s evening shoe, black patent with a pointed toe and a velvet bow. At the corner of Agricola and West Street, Fred brushed the snow off and righted an empty baby carriage.

But I think Fred’s less successful than Clare as a character. Watt makes him a prewar German immigrant, which allows her to evoke the jingoistic suspicion of an “enemy alien” who is actually a naturalized Canadian. I like the theme and how Watt plays it, but Fred’s a bit too good to be true, as if the chief victim of the narrative must be a paragon.

Leo’s more believable as a person, but what happens to him, less so. He’s a sapper, assisting the engineer officer who tunnels under German lines. Watt’s depiction of that rings true. But the narrative fudges on what the Western Front looks and feels like, and other details are simply inaccurate. Most critically—and I don’t want to reveal too much–Watt fails to consider what a civilian’s possession of a firearm in a war zone can mean, as in getting the entire village put up against a wall. Moreover, that entire setup seems designed to alter Leo in convenient ways, whereas leaving him as he was, though messier, would add depth and conflict.

Finally, I hope that what I read is an uncorrected proof — although it doesn’t say so — and that a proofreader will catch mistakes like the constant misspelling of Fred’s German name, and the typographical and grammatical errors that crop up.

Still, I enjoyed Dazzle Patterns. The story is compelling, Watt tells it with brio, and has provided a heroine worthy of your time and attention.

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

Pioneer Abolitionists: The Invention of Wings

27 Monday Aug 2018

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Review: The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd
Viking, 2014. 373 pp. $28

On Sarah Grimké’s eleventh birthday in 1803, her mother, Mary, “promotes” her from the nursery to a bedroom, a welcome, long-awaited change. Sarah’s tangible birthday gift displeases her immensely, however — a slave girl named Hetty, a.k.a. Handful, slightly younger than herself, to be her maid. Sarah’s oldest memory, from age four, which still terrifies her, is of watching one slave whip another on her mother’s orders. The brutality and injustice, driven home by Mary Grimké’s obdurate character — she’s a nasty piece of work — mold young Sarah into an abolitionist. That’s quite a turn for the daughter of a planter aristocrat judge in Charleston, South Carolina, and when Mary calls her “different,” it’s not a compliment.

Wood engraving of Sarah Moore Grimké, date unknown, presumably during her lifetime (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Sarah has no friends or confidantes, and her only allies in her family prove treacherous. Given her longings and principles, she turns to Handful, attempting to free her, sharing secrets and teaching her to read and write (against the law, of course). Handful, however, remains largely unimpressed, seeing her unwilling mistress as a representative of the system.

The Invention of Wings is a superbly imaginative, engrossing novel that occupies difficult terrain, and I applaud the author’s effort and intentions and much of the execution. Still, I wonder about the portrayal of the key relationship, which throws the novel off its footing. From her life as a slave and her own social isolation, Handful would likely recognize the loneliness in the plain, socially awkward Sarah, who struggles with a stammer, and who’s crushed whenever she objects, protests, or simply expresses her individual viewpoint. To be sure, Sarah would never be whipped, may read and write without fear of punishment, eat whatever she wants, need not labor, and at least may protest openly, for what little good it does.

All the same, I think Handful would have come across more completely had she wrestled with two opposing instincts: to go further toward accepting Sarah’s friendship in the spirit it’s offered, warily, while also resenting her like hell. Kidd takes pains to show how Handful’s mother, Charlotte, instills in her the urge to resist, so we’re meant to think her rebellion is earned. Yet her attitudes seem so fully formed and coherent, I kept thinking she anticipates 1960s radicals by a century and a half. Is that implausible? I’m not sure. The Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina (Nina), were famous radicals of their day, pamphleteers and lecturers for abolition and feminism. Unlike the vast majority of abolitionists, Sarah campaigned not just for ending slavery but for racial equality. So why can’t Handful offer a counterpart?

Maybe it’s because the voices don’t feel quite right. Like Handful’s what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, Sarah’s righteousness rings hollow after a while. I want her to put two and two together and realize, at least dimly, that her financial and social privilege derives entirely from a system she detests, and that when she dresses up to go to a ball, what she’s wearing on her back has come from beatings, repression, and the cruelest kind of exploitation. Otherwise, how could her hatred of slavery be so certain? I also want the two main characters to tangle over what separates them; instead, they have a few unsettling exchanges and withdraw from one another to the extent that they can.

Despite these flaws, Kidd’s narrative makes an excellent story, and The Invention of Wings re-creates the antebellum South in its mesmerizing, ugly panoply. Her prose feels effortless, never calling attention to itself, with carefully chosen, lucid images inducing a mood. Sarah sees bare tree limbs “spread open like the viscera of a parasol,” or herself betrayed as “the collared monkey dancing to his master’s accordion.” Handful pictures God as a white man, “bearing a stick like missus or going round dodging slaves the way master Grimké did, acting like he’d sired a world where they don’t exist.”

I like how Kidd takes a real-life abolitionist and feminist pioneer and shows you how she came to be. In fact, the feminist thread feels more nuanced and sure-handed to me, evolving rather than springing nearly full-blown into life. Giving the elder Grimké sister a foil in Handful is a bold move, even if their relationship wants more fleshing out, more controversy.

The Invention of Wings is a brave book; perhaps a little more bravery would have made it even better.

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