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Awakening in Egypt: Dreamers of the Day

14 Monday Aug 2017

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Review: Dreamers of the Day, by Mary Doria Russell
Random House, 2008. 249 pp. $15

Agnes Shanklin, a forty-year-old Ohio schoolteacher, knows she’s ugly, drab, incompetent, ungrateful, unworthy, and just about un-everything else. How does she know this? Why, her sainted mother, may she rest in peace, told her so every day, and Mumma’s voice still resounds in Agnes’s head every time the still-dutiful daughter dares call a thought her own.

But it’s 1921, and the influenza pandemic that has killed even more people than the First World War has set Agnes free. Her entire family has died, including Mumma, which results in a financial windfall–three estates to inherit–but, most important, nothing to stop Agnes from learning what life can be like when nobody’s degrading her. On a whim–a new experience in itself–she shops in the fanciest department store in town and manages to hold off the maternal yammer in her ear while she acquires a bob haircut and an up-to-the-minute wardrobe. Thus equipped, she decides to expand her horizons and take a vacation, another first. Her destination is Cairo, and her only companion will be her dachshund, Rosie.

Egypt might seem an unusual destination for Agnes, but she recalls, with excitement, a lecture she attended about Lawrence of Arabia. And it’s nothing short of wonderful that when she reaches Cairo, she meets the man himself–and Winston Churchill, Britain’s minister for the colonies, and Gertrude Bell, the famous Arabist and traveler in the Middle East. They’re in Cairo to negotiate an agreement ancillary to the Treaty of Versailles that will redraw the map as we essentially know it today. Agnes, at first abashed to be in such august company, gradually scrapes her confidence together and contributes to dinner-table conversation about colonial politics, crossing swords with Churchill and Bell.

Lowell Thomas’s 1919 photo of T. E. Lawrence (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the U.S.)

That description illustrates the charm with which Russell has imbued Dreamers of the Day. In the abstract, it seems completely implausible that an Ohio schoolteacher could crash a diplomatic party, let alone be welcomed into its midst, yet Russell makes that work. There seems no reason to doubt that when their paths cross at the best hotel in town, Agnes will be swept up into dinner parties and social excursions. What’s more, I love Russell’s characterizations of the diplomats, especially that of Lawrence, who comes across as more sensitive and thoughtful by half than anyone else there, and believably so. Russell says she’s let the famous characters speak the words they wrote or were ascribed to them in multiple sources, and I believe that too.

The best historical novelists render the period through their characters’ internal lives so that you can practically breathe the atmosphere on the page. So it is here, from the second paragraph:

You must try to feel the hope and amazement of those years. Anything seemed possible–the end of ignorance, the end of disease, the end of poverty. Physics and chemistry, medicine and engineering were breaking through old boundaries. In the cities, skyscrapers shredded clouds. Trucks and automobiles were crowding out horse-drawn cabs and drays in the boulevards below. The pavement was clean: no stinking piles of dung, no buzz of flies.

However, this viewpoint also demonstrates the chief weakness of Dreamers of the Day. The sense emerges both between the lines and in them that Agnes realizes what the future will hold, a dramatic irony that needs no emphasis, since the reader already knows that the diplomats failed utterly to create peace in the Middle East. Her uninformed skepticism, especially balanced against the more optimistic views of Bell and Lawrence, sounds forced and artificial. The “hope and amazement of those years” might have served Russell better in Agnes’s mouth.

Russell compensates somewhat by letting Agnes fall in love with a man who may or may not be a German spy. Karl offers a political counterpoint to the Brits, but he also shows her attention and kindness and even tells her forthrightly that Mumma doesn’t sound very nice at all. I like this part and wish there had been more of it, for Dreamers of the Day works best when the politics share the narrative rather than overwhelm it.

That’s why I don’t understand the last chapter, which drops into magical realism, a mode I dislike and one at odds with the book. It’s there, I think, to allow Agnes to soapbox about subsequent politics–another no-no–when the real story ends in Cairo.

Not only that, but as someone who admires Russell’s skill and diligence, I’m startled that she cuts corners about Gallipoli, Churchill’s great failure. I like her take that Churchill was a such a narcissist, he’d never miss a chance to rehash the campaign and exonerate himself. But the scene relies on so many historical inaccuracies, he sounds like an ignorant fool, and that’s plain wrong.

So I think that, unlike Doc, which I reviewed in these pages and liked very much, Russell gets ahead of herself in Dreamers of the Day; despite some fun bits, it doesn’t quite come together.

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

Death and Taxes: We That Are Left

31 Monday Jul 2017

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Review: We That Are Left, by Clare Clark
Houghton, 2015. 450 pp. $28

What a marvelous bunch these Melvilles are, minor Hampshire aristocracy who keep the new twentieth century at arm’s length. Sir Aubrey Melville, Bart., cares for nothing except his estate, Ellinghurst, whose manse is an architectural oddity, and whose three-hundred-year history he’s been writing forever. As for Lady Melville, if snobbery were a lethal weapon, she’d have as much blood on her hands as Jack the Ripper. The Melville children–Theo, Phyllis, and Jessica, in descending order–know her as Eleanor, the only intimacy she allows them, though Theo occupies a throne in her heart. Phyllis has withdrawn from the family in favor of books, angering Jessica in particular, who craves excitement and dotes on Theo, a selfish, mercurial bully who likes nothing better than to take horrifying risks and push others to do likewise.

The lonely sailor trying to stay afloat in this maelstrom of dysfunction is Oskar Grunewald, a fatherless young boy, son of a family friend. When in the Melville children’s company, he’s either ignored or targeted for abuse, just as he is at school. But you know he’ll be the hinge on which the narrative turns; the typically pointless prologue tells you so. And you also know, because of the title, the year the real action begins (1910), and an epigraph dating from the First World War, that the Melvilles are in for it. We That Are Left evokes a familiar theme in fiction, Edwardian gentry struggling to understand–or, more accurately, refusing to understand–that they’re dinosaurs. Untimely death and estate taxes will destroy their way of life, but more than that, unavoidable social changes are coming, and their cosseted world will never be the same.

Punch cartoon satirizing the changes in women’s dress, 1901-11, published in the U.S., 1921 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the U.S.)

But if this message sounds familiar, as narrated in, say, Philip Rock’s Passing Bells, Clark goes much deeper. Her characters live what they say and believe, so that you never feel they’re talking heads, a collection of opinions. With one exception, Clark reveals their inner lives so naturally and vividly that in understanding them, you see their milieu and its ferment as clearly as if you were standing there. And since most of her characters other than Oskar are disagreeable, it’s a rare feat to make them compelling, let alone to stretch their story to 450 pages and keep you riveted. How does she do this? One passage, from Oskar’s perspective, gives a glimpse:

It was as if the nerves in him had been magnetised, irresistibly drawing sensation to his eyes, his lungs, his brain, his skin, until the intensity of it was almost too much to bear. He walked along the familiar streets in a daze of seeing, overcome by the greenness of the lawns and the blueness of the sky and the perfect pewter gleam of the cobbles beneath his feet, struck time and again by the loveliness of things he had somehow never noticed before: the round glass panes in an overhanging upper window like bottoms of bottles, the splintery grey grain of a warped medieval lintel, the straining neck and gripping claws of a pockmarked gargoyle clinging for dear life to a narrow ledge, its mouth stretched wide and its veined wings raised and half-opened, ready for flight. He had not thought the world so full of ordinary marvels.

Oskar’s in love, of course. But Clark never has to tell you that; she renders a primary emotion in its full physical intensity, without any mention of rapid heartbeat or breath. (That Oskar’s studying physics accounts for the metaphors about magnetism and colors.) I admire this artistry very much, which goes far beyond use of prose, and certainly not the kind that explodes like fireworks or calls attention to itself, which Clark’s doesn’t anyway. Rather, I enter Oskar’s mind and heart, just as I do those of the less sympathetic characters like Jessica, who’s selfish, spoiled, and manipulative. I don’t have to like her, but I can see her point of view and care about how she learns about life.

That said, not everyone will sit still for a long, character-driven novel, especially one that takes fifty pages to get going. There’s too much talk of theoretical physics, which, aside from being technical, rather too baldly fits the theme of the laws of nature challenged. And though Clark stands above many authors I’ve read recently for her gift at writing character, she’s taken shortcuts with Eleanor, who’s got little to show except her obsessive love for Theo, her only boy. It’s also startling that the ending, though prefigured by the needless prologue, feels like an improbable reversal, almost Dickensian in content, and melodramatic besides.

Even so, I enjoyed We That Are Left and learned something about writing novels.

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

Child Love: The Light Between Oceans

24 Monday Jul 2017

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Review: The Light Between Oceans, by M. L. Stedman
Scribner, 2012. 343 pp. $25

Tom Sherbourne returns to his native Australia after the First World War deeply disturbed by what he saw and did and seeking solitude. He has nothing and no one to hold onto, and he finds what he thinks is the perfect job, tending a lighthouse on a forlorn island off the Australian coast. There, no one will ask him about his past, and his exacting, meticulous duties will keep him busy for the months that stretch between brief shore leaves.

Tom wonders why he survived the war when so many others didn’t or came home physically or emotionally maimed. But that’s not the only trauma to trouble his dreams. His mother left home when he was a young boy–or did his father, a cold tyrant with no access to any feelings except anger, throw her out? Either way, both have passed from Tom’s life, and his brother Cecil, the favored son due to inherit the family business, is equally unapproachable in Tom’s eyes, though it’s not clear why. But it’s enough to know that Tom Sherbourne has no family to speak of, or to.

Supplies being unloaded for South Solitary Island lighthouse, Australia, 1946, unknown photographer (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

However, on shore leave, he meets Isabelle Graysmark, a spirited, adventurous young woman, and they’re immediately attracted. Tom, much older and badly bruised, distrusts the vulnerability where tender feelings lead, and she practically has to convince him to marry her. He dares hope that Izzy will be his reward, however undeserved, for having survived a miserable childhood and the war. For her part, Izzy believes implicitly that she couldn’t have found a more loyal, steadfast, and loving husband, or a more nurturing father for their children. She only wishes he’d tell her what happened to him before they met.

To their delight, Izzy becomes pregnant almost immediately but miscarries–and again, and again. Each time, she blames herself, and what’s worse, she can’t understand his reaction. He aches for her, he’s sad and sorry, but he’s not devastated for himself. He cherishes their lives together as the first tenderness he’s ever known, a gift that many soldiers serving under him never got the chance to receive. He understands what she doesn’t, that life is often unfair, and that there’s no malign intent involved or blame to pass around, only bad luck and circumstance. But Izzy thinks his gratitude for what they have means that he’s cold and hurtful, incapable of feeling. And one night, when a rowboat lands near the lighthouse carrying a dead man and a young infant, the Sherbournes make a desperate decision that will mark their lives and others’.

The Light Between Oceans is an accomplished novel, and Stedman’s first. At its best, the narrative touches the lyrical and depth of insight and makes them one. Consider Tom’s first view of the island, before he meets Izzy:

Hundreds of feet above sea level, he was mesmerized by the drop to the ocean crashing against the cliffs directly below. The water sloshed like white paint, milky-thick, the foam occasionally scraped off long enough to reveal a deep blue undercoat. At the other end of the island, a row of immense boulders created a break against the surf and left the water inside it as calm as a bath. He had the impression he was hanging from the sky, not rising from the earth. Very slowly, he turned a full circle, taking in the nothingness of it all. It seemed his lungs could never be large enough to breathe in this much air, his eyes could never see this much space, nor could he hear the full extent of the rolling, roaring ocean. For the briefest moment, he had no edges.

It’s a good novelist who can make beautiful sentences draw the reader into a character’s inner life without calling attention to themselves. And in focusing her characters on the most primal attachment, that for a child, Stedman evokes tremendous power from a relatively simple story. I say relatively because she requires more coincidence and suspension of disbelief than I like, but once you get past that, there’s no denying the passions or the moral issues involved.

I have a harder time getting around Izzy’s character. I like how the spontaneous girlishness hides other, dangerous levels, but–without giving away too much–I think she becomes unglued, and by the time I finished the book, I didn’t like her much. Liking a main character isn’t requisite, but I wanted to feel more sympathy for her than I did, and I might have, had she struggled with the momentous decision that drives the narrative or consider how it might affect someone else. Instead, she sets her mind and seldom thinks about it again–refuses to, even.

All the same, Stedman’s a very good writer, and The Light Between Oceans will make you think.

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

Two Young Men: Valiant Gentlemen

08 Monday May 2017

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Review: Valiant Gentlemen, by Sabina Murray
Grove, 2016. 489 pp. $27

This superb, engrossing novel derives much of its considerable charm from a rare feat. Valiant Gentlemen explores utterly serious subjects with insight and compassion, yet the author doesn’t take herself too seriously, nor do her characters. And this must be intentional, because when one character begins to look too hard at his reflection in later life, this shift marks his downfall.

The three stars in Murray’s constellation are Roger Casement, Herbert Ward, and Ward’s wife, Sarita. All three were historical figures, and Casement is particularly significant, a man who campaigned against colonial abuses in Africa and for Irish independence. If you’ve heard of him, you’ll almost certainly know his tragic end; but in this book, the journey counts more than the destination, so don’t let that deter you. (That said, skip the jacket flap, a hodgepodge that accomplishes nothing except to blab what should be withheld and hide what should be revealed.)

Herbert Ward, left, and Roger Casement, as young adventurers in the Congo in the late 1880s (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The journey here begins in the Congo in 1886, where young Casement and Ward meet. Both are looking for gainful employment and adventure, but since the work pays little, adventure keeps them going. At first, they toil for King Leopold of Belgium and his so-called International Association of the Congo, but then for British trade interests, both of which carry political consequences. However, at this point, those considerations still percolate below the surface. Ward, a former circus acrobat, seasoned traveler, dead shot, and gifted sketch artist, is at heart a deeply lonely man who wants to make good. Casement, a skilled linguist, brilliant organizer, charismatic, and possessed of boundless energy, is lonely too, but for a different reason. He’s homosexual, a fact he must conceal, and he’s hopelessly attracted to Ward.

I find Valiant Gentlemen irresistible, the African scenes especially, because I’ve lived in Central Africa and researched Leopold, his hireling Henry Stanley, and the colonial plunder of that region. So it’s a particular pleasure to run across names of peoples, places, and historical figures I haven’t seen in years, more so that Murray captures their essence. For instance, when Ward remarks of Stanley’s latest book that it’s full of bravado, Casement ascribes that to the “typical writing style of short, ill-tempered men.” Touché. And when Murray describes the weather, and its “usual blanket of heat,” she re-creates what it feels like to be in that place:

Casement might welcome rain, but that would transform the path into a river, which would, in turn, give way to a mud track. And the brief relief from the insect population that happens in the wake of these torrential downpours would only offer up the intense humidity that mosquitoes love so well. One discomfort merely exchanged for another, which makes the absence of choice about such things almost tolerable. Or at least promotes a philosophical stance regarding his lack of control.

The two men’s paths diverge, as each gets what he’s been looking for. Casement sets his sights on becoming British consul in one African colony or other, and Ward leaves Africa and gets married. His bride is an Argentinian-American heiress, so you may well ask how a penniless, erstwhile acrobat manages to attract her and earn her father’s consent. But I won’t tell you, except to note that Sarita Sanford is a woman ahead of her time and says what she thinks. When two such irrepressible spirits meet, the results are bound to be hilarious.

The marriage gives Ward what he’s always wanted, respectability. But, unlike Sarita, he calls that an end in itself, the mirror-gazing I referred to above. She’s less conventional than he, perhaps because she recalls her early girlhood, and what it was like to be poor, differently from how Ward holds onto his past and a father who had only contempt for him. So he doesn’t quite know what to make of Casement the muckraker, who earns fame publicizing Leopold’s brutalities, a gripping subject that Murray handles with skillful economy yet raw power. Ward’s always happy to see Casement and drink with him–and the Ward children love their Uncle Roddie–but you sense the growing rift between the two old friends, and a betrayal in the wind. Sarita, meanwhile, understands Casement perhaps better than her husband, though the two men have a bond she can’t share. The First World War brings matters to a head.

Murray dazzles you without being self-conscious; it just seems natural. So it’s startling to come across phrases like “tipping point” or “I’m fine with that,” which I doubt were current in 1910, or careless errors, like council when the text implies counsel. All the same, I’m fine with unbridled zest and a bubbling, potent narrative; Valiant Gentlemen is a brilliant, magical book.

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

South African Tragedy: Who Killed Piet Barol?

17 Monday Apr 2017

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Review: Who Killed Piet Barol?, by Richard Mason
Knopf, 2016. 362 pp. $28

Despite the title, this remarkable novel is no whodunit, unless you take the death implied in the title as a more symbolic accusation, in which case we’re all guilty.

Now that I’ve confused you thoroughly, let me explain. Piet Barol, last seen in The History of a Pleasure Seeker making his way in Amsterdam through roguish charm, has broadened his horizons and his debts. Styling himself a French viscount, he’s living large in Cape Town with his American wife, Stacey, a former opera singer blessed with charm and diplomatic cunning more than equal to his own. But the Barols’ furniture business is failing, partly because Piet can’t bring himself to collect what he’s owed, but mostly because they spend money they don’t have to keep up appearances. Things look desperate, especially as the year is 1914, and Europe plunges into war, which puts Piet in a bind. Had he represented himself truthfully from the get-go as a Dutch national, he’d be in the clear, since the Netherlands remains neutral. But as a French aristocrat, surely he should be fighting for la patrie?

The South African Native National Congress delegation to the British Parliament in 1914 tried unsuccessfully to reverse colonial land policy (courtesy historywiz.com)

So it’s altogether convenient that he disappear for awhile, and when he hears that there’s a forest full of high-quality wood available for the taking, he sees how he can restart his furniture business with practically no overhead. However, to find the wood and remove it, he must hire two Xhosa men, Luvo and Ntsina; and therein hangs a tale.

First of all, this is no ordinary forest, but one dating from the time of Jesus, fecund in its density:

The grove was almost a single being, so bound were its member trees to one another, and yet each was wholly individual. They had grown together from saplings and forged a union without conflict, free from betrayal and viciousness. In their crowns were gardens of fertile soil, several inches deep, dropped over centuries by passing birds. In these gardens earthworms wriggled, grown distinct from those that churned the forest floor. Their branches began thirty feet above the ground, and this refuge from predators made them desirable residences for all sorts of creatures that relished distance from the great cats.

The forest represents a society of interdependence, in other words, a metaphor for that which white colonists have set about destroying among the Bantu peoples whose land they have stolen. More specifically, the noblest trees serve a religious purpose for the Xhosa, who believe their ancestors reside within them, whereas Piet doesn’t even know that the trunks are as old as Christianity.

But Mason, who managed to make Piet a sympathetic character as an Amsterdam imposter, does so here as well. Not only does Piet befriend Luvo and Ntsina in a true sense and grow to trust them, he lets himself see things from their perspective and corrects his behavior accordingly. He also entrusts his young son, Arthur, to them so that the boy can learn the ways of the forest, which Piet correctly judges will help him grow into a man. That said, Piet nevertheless sets out to take the Ancestor Trees, and though he fully intends to compensate Ntsina and Luvo for the loss, he’s a plunderer. And his failure to stand up to Stacey, especially where his African associates are concerned, makes him a weakling.

Then again, the degree to which he comes to love and understand life in the wild frees him from many prejudices. It also releases the artist in him, so that the furniture he carves adopts African themes and is absolutely gorgeous. Morever, Mason takes care to show the village politics among the Xhosa, many of whom, in their own way, are just as rapacious as the colonials.

But in the end, you know that all this will go wrong, that the scale of destruction the white men wreak will be far greater than that of the black, and that only one side will profit. That systematic destruction answers the question of the title, and that’s why I said we’re all guilty for condoning or participating in the crime. But how Mason arrives at this conclusion makes a fine tale, and that he renders the Xhosa in ways that ring true is no accident. For a year, he lived among them in a tent, learning their language and culture, and establishing a center for green farming. Who Killed Piet Barol? is a worthy result, a wide-ranging discussion of morals and racial tensions, and a pretty good yarn besides.

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

Destroyed by Desire: The Midnight Cool

20 Monday Mar 2017

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Review: The Midnight Cool, by Lydia Peelle
Harper, 2017. 359 pp. $27

Summer 1916, Richfield, Tennessee. Billy Monday and Charles McLaughlin, grifters who could smooth-talk just about anyone into buying a bridge, have rolled into town, normally a prelude to a quick deal and an even quicker getaway. But Leland Hatcher, the wealthiest man in Richfield–note the town’s (fictional) name–has advertised a beautiful black mare, The Midnight Cool, for sale. Charles, who knows horseflesh a little, has never seen so captivating an animal, and though he may be a vagabond, he decides he’ll have that horse. Billy, who knows people as well as horseflesh, is skeptical (and, by the way, note his name too, an ironic twist on Billy Sunday, a famous evangelist). What’s more, Hatcher’s daughter, Catherine, whom Charles meets by chance, tells him the horse isn’t worth his money.

But Charles is after more than the horse, something he realizes only when he tries to buy it. He wants to be welcome in homes like Hatcher’s, to ride in a car like his Pierce Arrow, and to be well thought of, as he supposes Hatcher is. But most of all, Charles wants Catherine, as captivating a young woman as he’s ever seen, though he assumes he’s not good enough for her. Wouldn’t you know, once Charles has sunk all the money Billy and he possess into The Midnight Cool, the horse throws and tramples Billy and must be destroyed. Naturally, the pair have to stick around in Richfield, so that Billy can heal and Charles can earn some money. Of course, that also gives him time to woo Catherine.

To his amazement, he succeeds more than he has any right to expect. Not only does Catherine respond, recognizing her own dreams of escaping Richfield in her new beau’s apparent freedom, he makes more money than he’s ever had before, and it’s even honest work. The British Army, fighting the First World War in French mud, has been buying American mules by the shipload. Charles scouts them out for a military contractor, and suddenly, the town worthies, including Leland Hatcher, begin to think of him as an up-and-coming young man involved in a righteous cause.

Unsung hero: a mule on the Western Front (courtesy warmule.org, via the National Library of Scotland)

But, as Billy, an Irish immigrant who’s fallen into many troughs on the waves of life, observes:

Caveat emptor, that was the first rule. The second was to never lie. Twist the truth, yes, hide it, decorate it, do what you would with it, of course, but you never looked a man in the face and opened your mouth and spoke an outright lie. You never knew when you might come through a town again, and you wanted to maintain a reputation.

Caveat emptor, indeed. Just as Charles has bought a murderous horse from an unscrupulous man (Hatcher drugged the horse so that she would seem docile), his other desires have blinded him too. He sees only the sympathy and attraction between Catherine and himself, not their differences; for starters, she’s a rebellious individualist, while he wants to fit in and be respectable. The mismatch between desire and personality repeats with all the other characters, save Billy.

Where many, if not most, novelists would focus on how people overcome obstacles to get what they want, Peelle’s more interested in how it hurts them once they have it. Hatcher does much worse than drugging horses, and he gets away with everything because he’s rich, but he’s also miserable. Peelle’s fascinated with power, which nobody uses well in this novel, and which always burns them. The reason that Billy lies outside this realm is that he wants what most people would consider little or nothing–only to see and appreciate life in its magnitude. Nobody can give him or deny him that, so he’s safe now, though of course, it wasn’t always so.

The Midnight Cool is a fine novel indeed, but reader, beware. As with Billy’s statement about telling lies and hiding truth, Peelle never lies outright, but she does hide things, sometimes in plain sight. I hate prologues, but I’ll make an exception here, because this one tells you what you need to know. Take it at face value, and if you keep going, you’ll be treated to a riveting, potent tale with characters whose inner lives are right out there. The Midnight Cool is a literary page-turner, what reverse snobs say is impossible, but trust me, Peelle’s an excellent storyteller, and her prose can be electric.

She does rely on one or two coincidences that might be predictable or predictably ironic or both, and she also shoves bits and pieces in odd places, so that you can learn how Billy and Charles met up and what keeps them together. But hell, nobody’s perfect. What I find more annoying are the cutesy mannerisms, such as the absence of quotation marks or the consistent use of alright instead of all right, which, though technically correct, strikes me as showing off.

All the same, Peelle has written something to brag about.

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

What Price Glory: To Conquer Hell

30 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918, by Edward G. Lengel
Holt, 2008. 491 pp.

When I started this book, I never thought to finish it, let alone review it. I was looking for a few paragraphs of background information I could use for a character in a novel I’m writing, and I figured To Conquer Hell would give them to me. But it gave me so much more that I kept reading, and what I read moved and angered me so much that I couldn’t let go.

Let’s get one thing straight. Few people other than historians–maybe even military historians–will be tempted to learn in agonizing depth about the Meuse-Argonne, which lasted the final six weeks of the First World War and was the bloodiest campaign American soldiers have ever fought. In a sense, Lengel’s thoroughness tests the reader, for he covers every single engagement (there were dozens), often down to platoon level, always from eyewitness sources. His research is more than voluminous; it’s heroic.

Destruction at Argonne, 1920 (courtesy U.S. Navy, via Wikimedia Commons)

Destruction at Argonne, 1920 (courtesy U.S. Navy, via Wikimedia Commons)

But just as Georges Clemenceau, premier of France at the time, observed that war was too serious a matter to leave to the generals, what Lengel has to say about war, citizen-soldiers, and the responsibilities of government are too important to leave to military historians. By setting these facts and arguments down, Lengel has done a true service. Reading his narrative, you see how the failure to prepare for a war nobody wanted made it even more horrible than it needed to be.

In telling this story, it’s not just that he breathes life into names well known (John J. Pershing, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur) and obscure, or that the words of ordinary soldiers drive the narrative. Nor is it only that you see, feel, and smell the battlefields, sense the tension and terror in the participants, and empathize with their heartbreak. Most importantly, I think, Lengel conveys how poorly they were led at every level, including the highest, with an appalling indifference to their sufferings that amounted to criminal negligence. Citizens of a democratic nation expect better, and the United States failed.

Start at the top. President Woodrow Wilson had no inkling of how to conduct a war, nor any desire to discuss strategy, political goals, or general objectives with his chief field commander, Pershing, whom he left completely in the dark. The only imperative was rushing as many soldiers as possible to France as quickly as possible, which meant they arrived with little or no training or equipment. I shuddered to read of the poor young soldier, about to go into battle for the first time, who didn’t know how to fire his rifle; or another, who, when the command came to fix bayonets, kept staring at his, as if it must be broken.

Speaking of bayonets, Pershing believed that it was the ultimate weapon, and that neither artillery nor machine guns mattered. Firepower didn’t win battles, he thought; spirit and will to victory did. That was what the French and British had believed in 1914 and had spent three costly, bloody years unlearning. But Pershing was convinced he knew better, and that the Western Front hadn’t seen what American bravery could do. As a consequence, he stubbornly and repeatedly ordered frontal assaults against heavily entrenched positions, to be taken regardless of losses. The results were predictable–units mauled, not to say murdered, sometimes cut down to half strength, demoralized, isolated from one another and from supply lines. Yet the attacks continued, as men went into battle having gone without food or water for days, lacking ammunition or other essential material–and when they failed to take their objectives, headquarters blamed their lack of drive.

Commanders who told the truth were replaced. But few even bothered; more typical were the likes of Patton and MacArthur, who cared only for their own glory. Patton, whom Lengel calls “insane,” claimed to have killed a soldier who refused to attack by hitting him over the head with a shovel. MacArthur’s vanity vastly overshadowed his grasp of military tactics; he twice promised his superior that either he’d capture an assigned objective, or his entire command would die trying.

I’m not arguing (nor does Lengel try to suggest) that the country should have prepared for war much earlier, thereby avoiding these problems. After all, Wilson won reelection in November 1916 on an antiwar platform, and it took repeated German blunders to persuade him and the nation to intervene in a conflict widely considered a European imperial blood feud. Rather, Lengel argues that once the United States entered the war, vain, incompetent leadership doomed the American common soldier, and that their sacrifice–125,000 casualties in six weeks–was unnecessary.

While reading To Conquer Hell, I kept thinking of those thousands of men who’d either enlisted in good faith or been coerced, whether through the draft or by vigilante pressure against “slackers” or “cowards,” only to be treated as cannon fodder. The home front never did learn the truth.

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

Eccentrics at Love and War: The Dust That Falls from Dreams

23 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: The Dust That Falls from Dreams, by Louis de Bernières
Pantheon, 2015. 511 pp. $28

To his 1939 comic drama The Time of Your Life, William Saroyan added an end note, as if he worried that his audience would miss his all-too-obvious theme: “In the time of your life, live. . . . Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed.”

The Dust That Falls from Dreams reminds me of Saroyan, providing a cast of (mostly) lovable and often hilarious eccentrics. Whether they realize it or not–and someone will eventually tell them–they’re searching for goodness everywhere, which they manage to find with surprising frequency. In other words, The Dust That Falls from Dreams bears only a passing resemblance to real life, though de Bernières has taken pains to re-create the Edwardian era and the First World War in precise detail. What matters most, he plumbs his characters’ inner lives. The apparent divide between the scrupulously accurate everyday and the fairy-dust plot is at once the novel’s charm and chief drawback; the earnestness with which de Bernières tells his tale fails to persuade me that his characters are plausible, much as I’d like to meet them.

 

A fashion plate from 1909 shows well-dressed ladies in front of Harrod's (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

A fashion plate from 1909 shows well-dressed ladies in front of Harrod’s (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

That said, it would be churlish to dismiss The Dust That Falls from Dreams as mere fluff, and even if it were only that, it’s a lot of fun. The premise, loose as it is, supposes that the children of three neighboring families in the countryside south of London have formed such a strong attachment that even the First World War can’t shake it–if anything, the bonds become stronger. How that happens, and what tragedies get in the way, make for a wide-ranging narrative that explores social class, love, sex, religious faith, valor, family relations, and a once-established morality uprooted by war. The chapters are short and episodic, a format I dislike, yet de Bernières usually succeeds with it, because his characters carry the day.

There’s Hamilton McCosh, father of four daughters and husband to Mrs. McCosh, a vicious snob, bigot, and altogether impossible woman. “What mortification and inconvenience it was to live in such terror of one’s wife,” he muses, “and to be obliged to stand up to her so often.” The only way he (or anyone else) can get around her is by telling her that a royal personage or duchess has endorsed a particular activity or behavior, in which case it passes muster. Mr. McCosh survives by playing golf, inventing gadgets, and keeping mistresses (though these are hardly mentioned and don’t figure in the story). The four daughters–Rosie, Christabel, Ottilie, and Sophie–are each irrepressible; my favorite is Sophie, whose malapropisms send everyone, this reader included, into hysterical laughter.

De Bernières takes you into all manner of nooks and crannies, whether how to fly a Sopwith Camel, what it was like to clean and maintain an Edwardian house, attend a séance, or talk philosophy with Bertrand Russell during a chance meeting on a train. You also learn what it was like to live and die in the trenches in 1915 or work in a hospital tending the wounded. But the narrative seldom shows the fighting or the chaos of triage as the stretchers are unloaded, only their aftermath, usually recounted by a witness or participant. I believe this is a conscious choice, and that de Bernières wants the reader to focus on the aftermath and effects, described with an eye to the individual, the peculiar, because it’s individuals who matter above all to him.

Where The Dust That Falls from Dreams rubs me wrong lies with Mrs. McCosh and her eldest, Rosie. Mama McCosh abuses people right and left, almost all of whom rush to excuse her. She’s maddeningly funny in her ridiculous social prejudices, but she also causes immense damage. I get that The Dust That Falls from Dreams is about the milk of human kindness, but the narrative squares up to other cruelties without making excuses for them. She, however, gets a pass.

I find Rosie irritating for similar reasons; priggish self-denial is seldom interesting, and she won’t let herself dream of what she’s missing, which makes her even duller. She remains fixated on her fiancé, killed in battle, in a plodding mysticism that surpasses understanding, and her sense of duty threatens to strangle her and everyone else. Since the fiancé was a well-liked, kind, noble-hearted romantic of no particular accomplishment or talent–a beloved nonentity, if you will–I suppose that de Bernières is trying to use the pair to represent the Edwardian age, golden but doomed, irretrievable. But Rosie’s obstinacy, which forbids even any mention of what’s happening, can be tiresome.

Consequently, I think The Dust That Falls from Dreams succeeds best as a discursive, sometimes antic take on its subject that delivers its most serious impact when, paradoxically, it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

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

Bravissimo!: Not All Bastards Are from Vienna

29 Monday Feb 2016

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Review: Not All Bastards Are From Vienna, by Andrea Molesini
Grove/Atlantic, 2015. 348 pp. $26
Translated from the Italian by Anthony Shugaar and Patrick Creagh

If there’s such a thing as a thoroughly engaging novel about war–one that deals squarely with death, cruelty, injustice, and stupidity–this is it. It’s also easy to see why. Molesini’s characters live and die displaying forcefulness, ingenuity, weakness, strength, and, in many instances, mordant wit that keeps them sane. They feel at once larger than life yet wholly plausible and human, the ineffable secret of great fiction.

Some of the 250,000 Italian soldiers who surrendered at Caporetto in 1917 (Courtesy Digital Library of Slovenia via Wikimedia Commons).

Some of the 265,000 Italian soldiers who surrendered at Caporetto in 1917. The figure was so high in part because many detested their commanding general, Luigi Cadorna (Courtesy Digital Library of Slovenia via Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

The story takes place in Refrontolo, thirty miles north of Venice, following the disastrous Italian defeat at Caporetto in late 1917, which permits Germans, then Austrians, to occupy the town and commandeer the villa belonging to the Spada family. The key figures are Grandma Nancy and Aunt Maria, genteel women sure of their place in the world, equally certain that it’s above the invaders’. If the matriarchs bow to the power of the men who plunder their home and burn its furniture to keep warm, it’s because the soldiers have weapons. However, as grandma starchily informs the Austrian commandant, that doesn’t mean they have authority.

Consequently, how the Spada family, its retainers, and the local priest, Don Lorenzo, treat their unwelcome guests (and one another) turns a typical wartime tale into a novel rich with explorations of evil, social class, love, youth, religion, and patriotism. Narrating this wide-ranging story is Paolo, the seventeen-year-old grandson/nephew of the matriarchs. His parents having died at sea, he’s an orphan, but he’s anything but moping. He doesn’t miss them, having never received any love or even closeness, and his relatives do their best to make up for it.

Paolo spends much time with his Grandpa Guglielmo, an armchair philosopher who always has something pithy to say (“war and loot are the only faithful married couple”), and who encourages his grandson’s keen interest in his surroundings. In fact, it’s interest, rather than engagement, that describes Paolo at the start, for he seems detached. He observes everything but often keeps his emotional distance, and I wonder why; maybe it’s the parents who never gave him warmth. Even in his pursuit of Giulia, a woman eight years his senior who turns many heads, Paolo seems more lustful than anything else.

However, among other things, the novel is his coming-of-age story, for as the war tightens its grip on Refrontolo and the Spada villa, he comes out of himself. He becomes closer to his grandfather, whom he tries to understand; gets involved in resistance activities; and begins to see the people around him in more complex ways. He’s also the receptive ear for his elders’ wisdom, as when his aunt–who’s trapped in her hopeless attraction for the Austrian commandant–says:

The vanquished cannot forgive the victors . . . even if no one ever knows who really wins and who loses, because what’s at stake, what’s really at stake, the things that no one ever talks about, are unknown. Life goes on . . . but you lose pieces of yourself along the way, every day.

There’s so much life to this book, even as it describes the ugliest things humans do to one another. The characters just won’t be denied. Everyone has his or her angles and corners, and no figure is too minor to pass by without a distinctive detail, as with the innkeeper whose hair, accent, and complexion bring him to life, even for the sentence or two in which he appears. No scene is too brief to go without proper attention to ambience, scenery, or impact, yet the narrative flies by rapidly. In lesser hands, this novel could be twice its length, but, as with the resourcefulness his characters must show, Molesini gets a long way on very little.

Two aspects of Not All Bastards Are from Vienna bother me. If Paolo is indeed meant to be withdrawn and self-contained in the beginning, and we’re meant to understand that his cold upbringing caused that, he changes rather quickly. It’s a pleasure to watch him mature, but I’m not sure I buy it. Secondly, the end feels a little contrived, but it’s not unjust, and I suppose few readers will mind.

A marvelous book.

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

What History Is (Or Isn’t): 1916

18 Thursday Feb 2016

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Review: 1916: A Global History, by Keith Jeffery
Bloomsbury, 2015. 436 pp. $32

As my regular readers may be tired of hearing by now, I care passionately about the First World War, and, like any historian, I also care about how my favorite subject is portrayed or perceived. I admit to being rabid about this, but I have my reasons, which, I like to think, go beyond the mud pie that I made with my own two hands (meaning my own book).

Rather, as the event that arguably shaped the twentieth century, the First World War still lives within myriad conflicts, as in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, or the former Soviet Union, to name only three. I can’t imagine trying to understand those problems without the proper historical background, so I think historians (and novelists) who choose the First World War have a double duty. Not only should they try to dig past commonly held myths and misperceptions (because otherwise we won’t learn what we desperately need to know), writers should make the people and the era come alive (because otherwise we won’t bother to learn anything).

Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street), Dublin, after the Easter Rebellion (public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), Dublin, after the Easter Rebellion (public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

To me, 1916 falls short on both counts, though in fairness, it’s a large task. Jeffrey starts with Gallipoli and ends with Rasputin’s assassination, also visiting Africa, Asia, Ireland, and Poland, among others. He covers the iconic battles of 1916 (Verdun, the Somme, Jutland), the Asian laborers recruited to toil in the war zone, and pays overdue homage to the hundreds of thousands of Africans who fought, fetched, or carried during the white man’s war. To get nerdy for three seconds, the author praises Hew Strachan, the Oxford historian whose excellent work has emphasized the war’s global breadth rather than just the Western Front, a focus Jeffery sets out to emulate, with some success. So far, so good.

Even better, Jeffery finds room for a raft of remarkable figures whom I’d never heard of. Frances Farmborough was an English governess in Russia who became a nurse on the Eastern Front; she even took photographs that enrich the historical record. Flora Sandes, born in England of Irish parents, served in Serbia as a nurse and as a soldier. John Henry Patterson, an Anglo-Irish veteran of the Boer War and a big-game hunter, raised, equipped, and (defying orders) armed a Jewish brigade.

Jeffery’s at his best, I think, where he seems most at home, Ireland. (He teaches at Belfast and has written about Ireland before.) I like his thoughtful, persuasive chapter on the Easter Rebellion, which captures the events, heartbreak, and passions, as well as their reach abroad, especially to the United States. He finds something new to say about Gallipoli and its impact on national feelings, no easy feat. And anyone who wants to know what Verdun felt like to the soldiers who rotated in and out every couple weeks will find it here, in horrific detail.

But 1916 is an odd book. If you blink while reading the introduction, you’ll miss the author’s scheme to base each chapter on an event in a given month. (Dating the chapters would have helped some.) Moreover, I’m not sure how you can select a single year, even one so significant, because global reach or iconic battles apply just as well to, say, 1917 or 1918.

Further, the reach is hardly global. The Germans nearly vanish, the French flicker in and out of sight, and the Belgians (my mud pie) might as well be trees. The Dutch never appear, though their neutrality influenced politics, economics, and the North Sea blockade. The chapter on the United States deals rather heavily with British intelligence officers and how they misled the American government–fascinating, but a peculiar emphasis. It’s also typical of 1916, whose voices are almost exclusively English or Irish. Not surprisingly, they usually express concerns and interests common to those nations, so that the worldwide lens has a peculiar, Anglo-Irish slant. Part of that has to do with available sources and what languages they’re written in, but still.

As for the story, 1916 can be hard going. Despite a profusion of facts, the vivid whole seldom materializes. The Anglo-Irish cameos offer a chance to add spark or provoke wonder, but they lack depth or face. Photographs help, but in the text, these men and women are talking heads, collections of statements and attitudes. People make history; that’s why it matters. Yet Jeffery pays little attention to character, even with a singular figure like Rasputin (though we get a blow-by-blow description of how British journalists broke the story of his murder).

One figure whom Jeffrey tries to sketch is Woodrow Wilson, an attempt that illustrates the unfortunate perpetuation of myth. Taking Wilson’s words about his Scotch and Irish heritage at face value–again playing the Irish legacy card–he casts the president as he wanted to be seen, a visionary statesman. Like many myths, this one has a grain of truth. But the larger truth is that Wilson’s less agreeable qualities, which included vain self-righteousness, doomed his vision from the start. Moreover, in that context, Jeffrey plays with another, related myth, that there could have been peace negotiations in 1916, had the Allies only been willing to listen. Again, the larger truth offers a more nuanced picture, and I wish Jeffrey had at least considered it.

Read Hew Strachan’s single-volume history, The First World War. It’s a terrific introduction to the subject but also a fine addition to other books.

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