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Bad Mother: This Lovely City

06 Monday Mar 2023

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Review: This Lovely City, by Louise Hare
Anansi, 2020. 384 pp. $18

Lawrence (Lawrie) Mathews, a young Jamaican whose brother died fighting with the RAF in World War II, has emigrated to London, believing the blandishments from the British government that he can make his fortune in the mother country. But he hasn’t reckoned on the racism, expressed in the most vicious, direct terms; or that most desirable material goods are still rationed in 1948; or that housing is in short supply, thanks largely to German bombs.

Nevertheless, by 1950, when the story begins, things are looking up. He plays clarinet with a jazz band, which he loves, and which brings in a little cash. As a day job, he delivers mail for the Post Office. And he’s found lodging with a kind, motherly woman who treats him with fond respect. Not just that: Lawrie digs the girl next door, who likes him back. What could go wrong?

Plenty. One day, while making a drop of black-market merchandise to help a friend (and make ends meet), he happens on a dead infant by a pond. Since the child is “coloured,” as the kindest word in common use puts it, an accusation against Lawrie fits all too neatly, especially since he can’t explain his presence at the pond without revealing he’s an accessory to illegal activity. But even a more legitimate excuse probably wouldn’t have helped Lawrie, for Detective Sergeant Rathbone hates Black people, immigrants, and most anyone else on two legs.

Worse, the case creates a sensation in the press, arousing white Londoners itching to blame outsiders for the hardships that haven’t eased much since V-E Day. Lawrie and his Jamaican friends must now watch themselves carefully on the street, while patronizing stores and—most especially—when the jazz band plays dance music for a hard-drinking crowd.

Nelson’s column, London, seen through the Great Smog, December 1952. The climatic disaster lasted five days and caused many thousands of deaths. (Courtesy N T Stobbs via Wikimedia Commons)

My favorite aspect of This Lovely City is the plot, which twists in unexpected ways, particularly in the final third. Both Lawrie and his girlfriend, Evie Coleridge, have secrets from the other. Evie also has a hard-hearted mother, an apt parallel to England. Mrs. Coleridge has suffered its whips and scorns herself, though that’s why—at least in part—she’s as tough as she is.

I also like how Hare re-creates postwar London, pinched and yearning to let loose, but also violently racist, in which what we would call micro-aggressions quickly flame into just plain aggression. The prose, though simple, occasionally rises to illumine emotional moments particular to that environment, as with this passage about Lawrie playing jazz before an audience:

The nerves would pass soon enough, but the moments before they started playing, before the music took over, always made him feel like one of the tigers at London Zoo. He’d gone there with Evie the previous autumn. She had leaned against the railing and stared in awe at the big cats, lounging lazily in their compound, but all he could think of was how sad they looked, those magnificent beasts now tamed and cowed by their conquerors. If anyone could understand the tigers it was him, trapped in a foreign land and reduced to parading himself before a paying audience. But then he’d raise his clarinet, the reed rough against his lips, and feel like a king.

I wish the characterizations worked with any consistency. Lawrie and Evie seem too good by half, and the terrible secrets they possess never credibly threaten their happiness. At times, quick resolutions—much like Lawrie merely lifting the clarinet to his lips, in the above passage—make me wonder whether Hare’s trying too hard to rescue her characters.

She also portrays Lawrie as a sexual innocent in ways I find hard to believe, particularly when a young woman invites him to take a bath at her house (in the days before he moves next door to Evie), and he has no idea she has plans other than cleanliness. At times too he seems generally clueless about his surroundings, as with his surprise that so much of London was bombed. Not much of a secret, that. What did he think his brother was doing in the RAF?

The two principals often have trouble locating their spines, to the extent that I lost patience with them and wondered what they saw in each other. Wouldn’t each lover seek out someone more forceful than themselves? They’re trying to be pleasant, sure, perhaps hiding behind that to avoid confrontations. Or maybe they confuse asking for what they want with meanness; it’s hard to tell. But whatever the explanation, I wanted more push from each of them, the lack of which might just be convenient to the plot.

As for the villains, the cops are faceless and horrid, without a single redeeming feature, including intelligence, so it’s a surprise to discover they actually know a thing or two. The most complex character in the book—perhaps the only one with sharp edges and kind impulses, both—is Mrs. Coleridge. She’s a piece of work, yet I understand her.

For all that, though, This Lovely City provides a glimpse of London as I’ve never read of it. Despite its flaws, the novel depicts the struggle to get by and dreams of a fuller life in real, day-to-day terms. That’s worth something.

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

The Marsh Girl: Where the Crawdads Sing

11 Monday Jan 2021

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Review: Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
Putnam, 2018. 368 pp. $28

Six-year-old Kya doesn’t know her real name is Catherine, nor has she ever been to school. All she knows is the South Carolina marsh where she lives with several siblings, a drunken, violent father, and a much put-upon mother. But in summer 1952, Ma walks out, after which Kya’s brothers and sisters follow. Little Kya has to raise herself, essentially, because her father’s often absent on a bender, which can be a blessing. Her only friends are wild creatures, whose habits she comes to know intimately; her greatest, sole pleasure.

You see the wild creatures she loves, rendered with insight and deep feeling:

A great blue heron is the color of gray mist reflecting in blue water. And like the mist, she can fade into the backdrop, all of her disappearing except the concentric circles of her lock-and-load eyes. She is a patient, solitary hunter, standing alone as long as it takes her to snatch her prey. Or, eyeing her catch, she will stride forward one slow step at a time, like a predacious bridesmaid. And yet, on rare occasions she hunts on the wing, darting and diving sharply, swordlike beak in the lead.

Kya herself might answer to this description, especially that of the “patient, solitary hunter.” The vivid portrait of nature in a place nobody else wants, whose human inhabitants the inlanders consider trash, provides a superb background. And the tale of how this girl grows up by her own wits (and kindness of strangers), terrified of just about everybody and everything except the marsh, makes remarkable reading.

However, Where the Crawdads Sing doesn’t settle for the unusual coming-of-age story, and therein rests its greatest shortcoming. Jumping ahead to 1969, as many of these short chapters do, there’s a mystery as well. A former high school quarterback, the town Lothario, is found dead in the marsh. You guess right away that the police, utterly incompetent and desperate to find a murderer (they refuse to accept that such a demigod could have died accidentally), will home in on the Marsh Girl, what the locals call her. She’s reputed savage, lustful, and depraved, the townsfolk’s way saying that she’s different from them, therefore expendable.

The All-Star Bowling Alley, Orangeburg, South Carolina, pictured in 2015. In February 1968, police opened fire on Black students protesting the alley’s segregation policy at the time. Three students were killed and dozens injured. (Courtesy Ammodramus, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Granted, the southern-justice narrative provides an instantly recognizable means to raise the stakes. But Owens introduces the death in a prologue and keeps the police procedure front and center, as if the mind-boggling story of a little girl in a marsh weren’t enough. As years pass, there’s also a tender romance with a young man who accepts Kya as she is. I’d have thought all that sufficient and quite lovely, so I ask why we need the mystery. I will say that the murder investigation allows Owens to expound, sometimes cogently, on mating habits and the genetics of survival, linking her protagonist’s story to evolution, a clever conceit.

But much of the novel feels contrived. I never sense that Kya, who undergoes great hardship and takes brutal, yet often predictable, knocks, is ever really in danger. Terrible things happen, but just as the marsh protects her from outsiders who don’t know its waterways or approaches, the narrative cocoons her, in a way.

Start with how a child grows to her twenties in perfect health, without ever having seen a doctor or dentist. But if that sounds like nitpicking, consider the split time frame, which puts you in 1969 right away, undermining the tensions of 1952 and the immediate years afterward. Also, the kind strangers often appear at just the right moment, sometimes bearing a bounty too good to be true. After a while, I get the idea that whatever trouble comes her way, luck will favor her.

Further, Kya’s voice goes all over the map, which jars me and pulls me out of the story. Owens seems eager to get to the age where Kya speaks and thinks like an autodidact biologist offering thoughtful commentary about evolution (itself a stretch), rather than stay with the bewildered, frightened child who doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from, or how to prepare it. Since I want to hear the child and don’t always believe the self-trained scientist, the struggle between the voices is very distracting, especially when one intrudes on the other. The paragraph quoted above, about the heron, supplies an example; Kya wouldn’t know what “concentric circles” means, let alone “bridesmaid” or “lock-and-load.” So who’s watching the heron?

Finally, the year 1969 witnessed turmoil and great events, but I don’t recognize them here, or little about the Sixties, for that matter. The Vietnam War barely makes an appearance, and though Jim Crow seeps around the edges, it’s as if Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement had gone unheard of in South Carolina. Moon landing? Nary a mention, even among the inlanders.

Despite a terrific premise and beautiful prose, Where the Crawdads Sing is one of those novels that would have appealed to me more had the author crammed less in it.

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

Rough Work: The Molten City

29 Monday Jun 2020

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Review: The Molten City, by Chris Nickson
Severn, 2020. 224 pp. $29

When we last met Detective Inspector Tom Harper in these pages, in Gods of Gold, it was 1890. The young man from the Leeds slums worked a grim job in his gritty native city, splitting his energies between keeping watch over the impending violence from a gasworks strike and scrambling to search for a missing child. Harper sympathized with the strikers, but the law was the law and favored gentlemen of property, against which he was helpless; more immediately, he feared that if he didn’t find the child soon, she’d die. Not all was pain and suffering in his life, however. He worked with a devoted sergeant, Billy Reed, who became a friend. And Tom was about to marry a widow, Annabelle, of independent mind and income.

Now, it’s 1908, and Detective Superintendent Harper is the number-two man in the Leeds constabulary. Annabelle and he have a sixteen-year-old daughter, Mary, active in the woman’s suffrage movement, as is her mother. Billy Reed has died. Harper no longer hears as well as he used to, and his reflexes have slowed. But little else in his landscape has changed. Having arranged security for a royal visit — receiving a signed appreciation from His Majesty, Edward VII, no less — his reward is to protect Prime Minister Asquith when he gives a speech in Leeds.

Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith (date unknown), whose face, the historian George Dangerfield later wrote, was “bland and weary . . . in which frankness and reserve had long fought themselves to a stand-still.” (The Strange Death of Liberal England, p. 4; photo courtesy George Grantham Bain collection, Library of Congress; via Wikimedia Commons)

Where few Britons would dare shout insults or complaints at their king and queen, many would jump at the chance to throw brickbats at Mr. Asquith for his broken promises. Poor workingmen and suffragists are the most likely to riot—including Mary, perhaps, or so her parents fear. Meanwhile, Harper has stumbled over evidence that, fifteen years ago, two children were snatched from their parents, perhaps “purchased” to live in a wealthy home where the mistress of the house has been unable to bear her own.

Had I read the intervening volumes since City of Gold, The Molten City might seem like yet another entry in a familiar formula, what some series can devolve into after a while. (Incidentally, all the volumes bear titles with metallic metaphors.) Yet this novel, like its progenitor, has so much going for it that you have to give it, and the author, their due.

First, there’s the atmosphere — political, social, physical, familial, you name it — which, to me, does far more than set the scene. Tom Harper, as the incorruptible, hard-working utterly dedicated police officer, with nary a social prejudice to his name and a firm belief in feminism, at times seems a little too good to be true. However, his feelings for and about Leeds, conveyed through these descriptions, show me that he loves his city and its people, and that his desire to serve is completely genuine. He stands for something.

That makes his perfection easier to swallow, and Nickson takes care not to let Harper’s halo shine among the populace, who wouldn’t see it, anyway. The rich treat him like a hireling, whom they’ll indulge with an audience if it suits them, not acknowledging that a criminal inquiry compels them to; the poor hate him on sight, because coppers are coppers. They’re none of ’em trustworthy.

Nickson uses simple language to set his scenes, with sparing economy:

The smoke and stink from the tanneries and factories rose up the hillside. Identical, anonymous streets of back-to-back houses. Away from the moor, there wasn’t a tree or a splash of colour to be seen. Someone’s washing hung from a line high across the cobbles, already turning grey from the soot in the air.

Attention to the character of Harper’s environment achieves one other storytelling goal of note. Since this is a mystery, which must live on “no — and furthermore,” many such narratives rely on plot points to deliver the obstacles, sometimes smoothly, otherwise seeming contrived. Nickson’s focus on Harper and his city means that the tension need not result from exterior forces, and that what’s within may raise the stakes. For instance, child snatching means more than a morally repugnant crime to Harper’s corps of detectives, several of whom suffered childhoods full of fear and violence that the authorities did nothing to assuage. Finding the missing children therefore becomes a personal quest, not just part of their job.

I also like how Nickson fuses the political and social issues of the day with the crime, his protagonist, and the Harper family. On every page, you see some aspect of how privilege influences or defines justice, and how each Harper works to change that, even as they remain pessimistic, to varying degrees, about the long-term outcome. And while they agree in sum about the importance of social change, the details get in the way, so that though they love one another, they don’t always get along.

As a consequence, The Molten City, despite its heroic paragon, delivers a satisfying mystery and a vivid portrait of a socially fragmented England.

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

Our National Shame: The Mercy Seat

24 Monday Sep 2018

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Review: The Mercy Seat, by Elizabeth H. Winthrop
Grove, 2018. 254 pp. $26

When the clock strikes twelve one steamy midnight in 1943, New Iberia, Louisiana, will send one of its sons to the electric chair. Willie Jones, an African-American teenager, has been convicted of raping a white woman. But whether young Willie deserves to die for this crime — or, in some minds, whether there was rape involved — divides this small, rural community to the point of violence.

Replica of the electric chair once used at Louisiana State Penitentiary (courtesy Lee Honeycutt via Wikimedia Commons)

Winthrop’s tale evokes To Kill a Mockingbird, of course, but she follows a very different, necessarily compressed route, for the action takes place entirely within twelve hours. The trial is eight months gone, ancient history, so there’s no Atticus Finch to plead for Willie’s life. Rather, his court-appointed lawyers, who never appear in the narrative, hardly opened their mouths to defend him. There is a child narrator, a sort of moral chorus role, the district attorney’s son, Gabe. But he’s one of nine third-person voices telling the story, seven white and two black. All are sympathetic to Willie, in varying degrees and for very different reasons, yet nearly all believe that there’s absolutely nothing they can do or could have done differently. No matter what their station in life, well off, scraping by, or dirt poor, they have one thing in common — they are terribly lonely, and their feelings about the forthcoming execution, which can’t be easily expressed, show just how isolated they are.

The great genius of The Mercy Seat is how Winthrop extracts almost unbearable tension from voices reacting to events that have been ordained, a Greek tragedy about modest lives. Although she reveals slivers of back story that challenge the reader’s assumptions, information isn’t what propels the narrative with such irresistible force. It’s feeling, pure and simple, rendered in physical description, as with this passage from Gabe’s point of view. This kind of writing takes my breath away:

He looks at his father — the lines bleeding back from the corner of his eyes, the hard bone of his nose, the flat space between his eyes, the quiver of muscle along his jaw as he chews — and for a frightening moment Gabe can’t find in all those features the father he knows. He can’t see the man in the backyard, shirtsleeves rolled up, pitching him a ball, or the man with the fishing rod and tan hat at the edge of the bayou, or the man sitting on the edge of Gabe’s bed at night, reading glasses on the tip of his nose. For a frightening moment, studied hard, his father’s features combine into the face of someone he can’t recognize, someone willing to send a man to death, and he feels himself reel the way he did when he took the slug from the Kane twins’ father’s flask, the world suddenly shot into the distance.

Every character in the novel lives with an urgent question, the necessity for all fiction, and that’s what provides the tension. Gabe’s question is whether he can still love the man who’s prosecuted Willie and sent him to the electric chair. And because the reader cares about both characters, you want to know how that will resolve. The Mercy Seat reminds me that heroism may be measured in small gestures, because there’s no chance of a great one.

The passage above comes from a two-page chapter, an authorial decision that cuts two ways. I don’t know how else Winthrop could have told her story through nine, well-crafted individual voices, especially with such thrift and elegiac power. Nor do I ever feel, as I have with other novels told in brief chapters, that the writer is pandering to readers with short attention spans. Still, the rhythm of rapidly changing perspectives gets to me after a while. I’ve never been much for pointillism, though the way Winthrop has selected her dots accomplishes one thing. Six of the seven white narrators wouldn’t call themselves bigots, and you sense their fear of the bitter, violent men who are.

With one significant exception, The Mercy Seat re-creates the time and place in ugly, frightening detail, down to the eagerness of the citizenry to witness the execution or listen to it on the radio (!). But World War II is hardly to be seen, except to provide an emotional transition for two characters. There’s little mention of rationing, though a bakery figures in the action, and there seem to be an awful lot of military-age civilians around.

But that’s a quibble. The Mercy Seat — which takes its title from a blues song about the electric chair — is easily one of the most powerful novels I’ve read this year. And I’m sick at heart to think of how the senseless hatred that condemns Willie Jones remains powerful enough in our country that politicians can appeal to it and hold public office.

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