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Sins of the Father: Enchantress of Numbers

29 Monday Jan 2018

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Review: Enchantress of Numbers, by Jennifer Chiaverini
Dutton, 2017. 433 pp. $27

He’s magnetic as few people are, well titled, brilliant, a poetic genius, utterly debauched, and what would today be called manic-depressive. Her parents try to warn her, but Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke, Baroness of Wentworth, will have her Lord Byron, believing that ardent love and a spotless moral example will cure him of his excesses. It’s 1815, the year of Waterloo, and a different sort of battle is about to begin.

Annabella’s delusion receives a sharp setback on her wedding day, and though the Byrons pass a few companionable weeks, during which Annabella becomes pregnant, their marriage quickly falls apart. Lord Byron prefers other women, especially his half-sister, Augusta, and only someone as innocent as Annabella could have failed to realize how deep that preference runs. By the time Annabella’s daughter is born, and he insists on naming her Augusta, as is his legal right, his long-suffering wife begins to get the idea. Shortly afterward, Annabella leaves Byron, a scandal so infamous the separation is forever referred to with a capital S. Henceforth, she calls her daughter only by her middle name, Ada, and sets out to eradicate any presence of her former husband, real or perceived. She decides that an overwrought imagination led to Byron’s depravity, and she watches her young child for that or any other evidence of “evil Byron blood.” Whenever Ada shows the least sign of willfulness, subversion, or curiosity deemed repugnant, Annabella leaves home, putting Ada in the hands of hirelings who enjoy correcting her every fault, many of which exist only in their eyes, and determined that no fairytales, flights of fancy, or moments spent ruminating ever be part of this young girl’s life.

I confess I have a visceral reaction to this novel, which could be subtitled How to Destroy a Child. I wanted to rescue this poor girl from parental tyranny and show her kindness, warmth, and encouragement. However, the stakes are even higher than that of an emotionally strangled child, for Ada is preternaturally intelligent, passionate about science, and a born mathematician. Luckily, Annabella tolerates this to some extent, or the world would have lost a genius. Known to history as Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s only legitimate child has been credited by some historians as having devised the first computer algorithm, in a journal article discussing the work of her close friend, Charles Babbage. But, as Chiaverini tells it, all this could have easily gone another way.

How this comes to be shapes the narrative, but Enchantress of Numbers is much more than a biographical novel, a genre that too often shows its limitations. Chiaverini succeeds brilliantly, in part because each chapter has its “no — and furthermore” and portrays Ada’s struggles lucidly. She longs to make her own decisions, and, as she gets older, to gain recognition for her science, not as an ornament to her father’s misbegotten reputation. Even better, Chiaverini carries these conflicts through Ada’s adulthood, and they never recede. Her mother remains withholding, elusive, and controlling; and men are men, with rights and privileges Ada can never claim. Moreover, though Ada counts among her friends such luminaries as Darwin, Dickens, Faraday, and Mary Somerville (Ada’s mentor, a brilliant polymath for whom a college at Oxford is now named), most scientists dismiss her work as dabbling, simply because she’s a woman. No doubt Countess Lovelace would have understood implicitly the endemic sexism in today’s Silicon Valley and have much to say about it.

Watercolor portrait of Ada King, Countess Lovelace, 1840 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, via Science and Society Picture Library)

But feminism aside, Enchantress of Numbers is also about a corrosive mother-daughter relationship and the rivalries that Annabella exploits for her own advantage. No question that Byron abused her, and since his subsequent poems satirize her mercilessly, she continues to suffer. But she passes on the punishment with interest, constricting Ada within an inch of her life while not letting her read the poems, so that the girl’s only knowledge of her father comes from her mother’s harangues. Even his family portrait is hidden in her grandparents’ house:

Whenever I was feeling especially brave, I would steal into the room alone and gaze up at the covered portrait, wondering what lay behind the dark green curtain. What did my father look like? Of course I did not remember . . . . There must be something truly terrible about his appearance or my grandmother would not have hidden him from view. . . . In my imagination — that wicked, persistent faculty — he became a chimera of the magnificent and the monstrous. . . . and . . . Since I was his child, something sinister and dangerous lurked within me too.

I wish that Chiaverini had devoted more space to Ada’s emotional reckonings late in her short life, though I understand why the author didn’t go that way. Enchantress of Numbers is lengthy as it is. But it’s utterly riveting as well as topical, and I highly recommend it.

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

Blood Money: Savage Country

22 Monday Jan 2018

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Review: Savage Country, by Robert Olmstead
Algonquin, 2017. 293 pp. $27

It’s rural Kansas, 1873, and many farmers have gone bust, whether from overextended investment, rapacious creditors, or the swarms of locusts that have wreaked destruction of biblical proportions. Elizabeth Coughlin, recently widowed and deeply in debt, decides to try to recoup her fortunes by assembling a buffalo hunting expedition. Properly cured buffalo hides are worth a fortune, prized as leather for factory drive belts or other applications requiring particular strength or resiliency. And to lead her expedition, Elizabeth asks her brother-in-law Michael, newly arrived from his latest journeys as a big-game hunter. Against his better judgment, Michael agrees — and no sooner has he said yes than the party gathers and prepares to head south. Michael, it seems, would rather do just about anything than talk, and when he’s around, life-changing decisions happen in a New York minute.

Digitally retouched photograph dating from the mid-1870s of a pile of bison skulls, to be ground into fertilizer (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

But he anticipates the dangers that lie ahead. As they cross the so-called dead line separating Kansas from Comanche territory, Michael finds the remains of a couple wagons whose murdered and scalped occupants make a grisly display. You know right away that Elizabeth’s quest will be a struggle to the death, but, as it happens, the Comanches aren’t the main antagonists. When it comes to raiders, white brigands are the worst; and if something burns, bites, floods, or falls from the sky, the Coughlin crew will have their fill of it. But what’s in the human heart causes even more misery, for it’s the pursuit of wealth, especially wealth that comes through killing, which destroys the spirit as well as the body.

Savage Country shows this in its vivid, gruesome descriptions of the buffalo hunt in its appalling carnage, and the inevitable rivalries and prejudices that divide the expedition. For instance, when a group of sick, starving black escapees arrives from a turpentine plantation — a form of industrial slavery — Elizabeth hires them to skin hides as a kind of rescue. But you sense that violence will erupt sooner or later, because not all her employees share her outlook.

It’s violence that shapes Savage Country, and I say that even as I recall other unflinching novels about the West, such as The News of the World or The Way West, which involve their share of brutality. Olmstead’s tale will deter some, but I, who consider myself squeamish, didn’t recoil. Maybe it’s because the violence establishes its own context, and that the characters, Michael and Elizabeth especially, try to make sense of it. And Michael has seen it before:

Michael listened to what the reverend doctor had to say until his mind began to wander. He held no anticipation of punishment or reward after death. He experienced no terror of the underworld, of the afterlife. He had no dread of suffering upon perishing. He believed in the transition of souls into horses and in the second sight of dogs and their ability to see invisible spirits and witches. He believed in omens and dreams and warnings and instinct. He believed, contrary to the Gospels, the meek, however blessed, would not inherit the earth.

But Michael, the rock of the narrative, resembles that substance in his refusal to express anything, which grates after a while. His deliberate terseness sometimes comes across as harsh and unyielding as the weather. The narrative succeeds best, I think, in its vivid descriptions of life and death on the prairie, which are as tense and dramatic as could be. But when it comes to human speech, the characters — even those who show more of themselves — don’t speak as much as they declare, as if they were coining homespun aphorisms, or trying to. I don’t believe that late-nineteenth-century frontier folk avoided contractions like the plague or snarled their syntax to avoid saying an extra word. Here, their language can be so stilted as to sound pretentious, and these people are anything but.

Still, I found the novel worth reading, both for its depictions of nature and the way it dramatizes its central themes. As Elizabeth observes, “For all the slave lords the war had killed, a new generation was born in their ashes and born inside of the new generation was the enmity of the old.”

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

Cloak and Swagger: The Vineyard

11 Monday Dec 2017

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Review: The Vineyard, by Maria Dueñas
Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza García
Atria, 2017. 530 pp. $26

When Mauro Larrea speaks, people listen. Admired in Mexico City for his business acumen, ability to take daredevil risks without blinking, and to carry himself as if he belongs wherever he goes, Mauro has what most would consider an enviable position. But he has also lost much in life — a couple fingers of his left hand, to an accident when he labored in silver mines in his youth; his beloved wife, Elvira, who died shortly after giving birth to their second child, Nicolás; his homeland (he was born in Spain); and now, nearly his entire fortune. The industrialist to whom he paid an exorbitant sum to ship him the latest in mining equipment has just died at the battle of Bull Run – for it’s 1861, and the Norteamericanos are slaughtering each other.

Not only is Mauro ruined, his adult children’s futures are at stake, for they would lose face, social position, and, in the case of Nicolás, an advantageous marriage. So for their sakes as well as his own, Mauro must leave Mexico City before the news gets out and make it seem as if his departure is simply another surprising but brilliant stroke in his inimitable entrepreneurial strategy. How he achieves this, I’ll leave you to discover, but I give you my word that he’s less than scrupulous, and that it’s very complicated.

So is the rest of The Vineyard, but before we get into that, let’s settle a question of genre. My friends at Atria have been offering me a steady diet of romances, a genre I dislike and have no patience for, though I did review one, thinking it would be something else, and regretted it. No regrets here. The Vineyard deals with deep passions, a rags-to-riches protagonist, Byzantine family cabals, and Latin locales vividly rendered, the themes and background common to much romantic literature. But The Vineyard isn’t a romance, capital R, especially not in the sense comparable to other authors named on the jacket flap.

Rather, in its whirr of subplots, each of which intrudes at the wrong moment for Mauro – but the right one to set up a “no; and furthermore” — the narrative recalls Alexander Dumas, père, and The Three Musketeers. Mauro is no D’Artagnan, a hot-blooded youth thirsting to drive a rapier between an opponent’s ribs. The duels in The Vineyard are psychological, based on swagger without the strut, a high-stakes gamesmanship, poker without the cards. Yet the comparison holds true, I think. And because the focus is money, especially inherited money, and the power it confers, for me that evokes another great nineteenth-century storyteller, Honoré de Balzac. Like him, Dueñas portrays Mauro constantly struggling to remain moral and not always succeeding. And also like Balzac, she pays attention to the emotional connection between character and reader, so that the morality feels personal, not abstract.

Consider this passage, when Mauro, in Cuba, contemplates accepting an offer to buy into a consortium that deals in slaves:

A firm, round breast loomed up at him. Attached to it, a tiny mouth sucking at a nipple. And, all at once, confronted by the simple image of a young mother with dark skin nursing a child, all those thoughts he had been desperately trying to thrust from his mind overwhelmed him with the force of a river bursting its banks. His hands extracting Nicolás from his wife Elvira’s bleeding body; his hands on [his daughter] Mariana’s belly the night of his departure from Mexico, sensing the new, unborn child. The skinny little slave girl violated by her aging master while she was cutting sugarcane; the baby daughter she had brought into the world when she was only thirteen, who was subsequently prized from her as one might peel away the skin of a fruit.

I’m not saying that Dueñas stands beside Dumas or Balzac, only making a point about possible literary ancestors and how she takes her craft seriously. This passage, though full of feeling, is unsentimental–which, to me, seems antithetical to romance, capital R–and describes great savagery, again perhaps atypical to that genre. Better yet, though Dueñas constructs an intricate plot and juggles its interlocking pieces with remarkable skill, she gives you the most compelling reason to turn the pages, fleshed-out characters with inner lives. If The Vineyard falls short, it’s that I find the story a bit operatic for my tastes, especially in its latter stages, with too much screeching. Likewise, some of the derring-do seems incredible, and the family rivalries can be hard to follow. But so long as we’re talking about opera, Dueñas generally hits the high notes, so it’s hard to complain.

The Vineyard is an entertaining, engaging novel.

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

The Tepid Tropics: Conquistadora

04 Monday Dec 2017

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Review: Conquistadora, by Esmeralda Santiago
Knopf, 2011. 414 pp. $28

Be careful what you wish for. That might be the moral of this novel, but it would be hard to blame its nineteenth-century protagonist, Ana Larragoity Cubillas, for wanting what no other young woman of her time, place, and social class could normally dream of. The daughter of a Seville aristocrat whose illustrious sixteenth-century ancestor sailed with Ponce de Leon, Ana asphyxiates in an emotionally and intellectually stifling home where name and pride are the only things that matter. Her parents, angry that she wasn’t born male, see no reason to treat her with warmth or kindness, since she disappointed them and will never amount to anything they approve of. Ana’s sole refuges are the diary her conquistador forebear left behind and the occasional visits to her grandparents’ farm, where she comes alive in the garden, the barn, and the fields. Naturally, these are no pursuits for a girl of noble lineage. But she is determined not to encase herself in crinoline, marry a rich dolt older than herself, and die without seeing the world.

Rescue comes in Ana’s teenage years from a schoolmate, Elena. Not only does Elena provide the friendship Ana has never known, the girls become intimate in ways the nuns at the convent school would not even have the vocabulary to describe. The girls’ encounters are easily the most passionate scenes in the book, and Elena is the instigator, a nifty surprise given that she’s much more conventional than Ana. But that’s not all. Elena has two handsome cousins, twins of fine manners whose merchant father has commercial interests in Puerto Rico. It’s assumed that Inocente will marry Elena; Ramón proposes to Ana. But Ana has a plan: Why don’t they all move to Puerto Rico and run the sugar plantation that belongs to her prospective father-in-law? With the will and persuasiveness typical of her, Ana sells everyone on the idea and convinces her stuffy parents to permit her marriage to a mere merchant’s son.

The difficulty of reconciling a romantic education to the real world is a common theme in literature; Cervantes, Flaubert, and Sinclair Lewis come to mind as practitioners. So it’s a given that Ana’s plan doesn’t work out the way she intended, but she’s nothing if not adaptable. And though the plantation is in far worse shape than she imagined, she’s excited to be there:

She’d been moving toward this destination not knowing exactly where it was, what it looked like, but now Hacienda los Gemelos was spread below her, calling to her. She wanted to be on the ground, to feel its rich earth, to smell it, taste it even. Long before she reached it, she knew she’d love this land, would love it as long as she lived. She was eighteen years old, had arrived at the end of a journey that was also a beginning, one that she’d already decided was final. I’m here, she said to herself. I’m here, she told the breeze. . .

Corvera’s 1893 drawing of Juan Ponce de Leon, first governor of Puerto Rico (courtesy British Library, via Wikimedia Commons)

The vivid descriptions are one thing I like about Conquistadora. Another is the care Santiago takes with her minor characters. She creates touching portraits of the slaves who work Hacienda los Gemelos, many of whom carry traumatic memories of their abduction and transport across the ocean. (The ones who don’t remember were born on the island, often to mothers impregnated by the white overseer.) Since these people are virtually invisible to their owners–except when they try to escape–Santiago is plainly trying to rectify the imbalance, and I applaud that.

That said, however, I find Conquistadora a tepid novel. It reads more like a biography of Ana (or, more properly, Hacienda los Gemelos) than fiction, consisting of events that follow logically, even predictably, and reach no height of feeling, except, as I said, the schoolgirl love affair. There’s no character arc, because you find out all you will ever know about the characters early on, and Santiago tells their emotions more than she shows them, so it feels rote. There’s no story arc either, just episodes. If you drew a diagram of the tension, you’d have a sine curve, not a rising line.

I also dislike the tendentious aspect of the narrative. Ana’s descended from a conquistador, and the title is Conquistadora, after all. You see how she mistreats her slaves, and how they suffer. So how many times do you need to be told directly that she’s much like her ancestor, and that her wealth is built on the dead bodies of enslaved laborers? Quite a few, apparently.

Conquistadora is more interesting for its subject matter than as fiction.

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

Life As a Messenger: News of the World

10 Monday Jul 2017

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Review: News of the World, by Paulette Jiles
Morrow, 2016. 213 pp. $23

The protagonist of this engaging, thoughtful novel, Jefferson Kyle Kidd, has an unusual profession. An itinerant version of a town crier, he travels the Texas frontier in 1870, reading carefully selected stories from out-of-town newspapers and charges his listeners a dime admission. Captain Kidd, as he’s known, dresses to project an image of an educated, experienced person of wide understanding, a role that comes easily, and chooses those stories that he thinks will fire the imaginations of his audience. He’s seldom wrong.

But it’s not just the captain’s profession or bearing that set him apart. A veteran of two wars, including that of 1812, and a southerner whose sons-in-law died for the Confederacy, Kidd has too much empathy to resort to race prejudice, reserving his hatred for viciousness, bullying, or predatory behavior. He likes his roving life, or so he believes, and there’s no tonic like his own company. And yet, he’s begun to realize that all isn’t what it could be.

He had become impatient of trouble and other people’s emotions. His life seemed to him thin and sour, a bit spoiled, and it was something that had only come upon him lately. A slow dullness had seeped into him like coal gas and he did not know what to do about it except seek out quiet and solitude. He was always impatient to get the readings over with now.

After this particular reading, he greets Britt Johnson, a black freedman whom he calls friend, who has a favor to ask. Britt has been given a fifty-dollar gold piece to bring a young girl to San Antonio, a four-hundred mile trip, returning her to her aunt and uncle following several years’ captivity with the Kiowas. Britt doesn’t want the job, partly because his two companions and he have urgent business elsewhere, but mostly because transporting a white girl would likely get him lynched. Kidd doesn’t want to be responsible for anyone, especially a ten-year-old who acts half-feral and will probably bolt at the first chance she gets. He’s raised two daughters, so he’s “done with all that,” he’s in his seventies, and he’s had enough trouble. But he can’t turn away from a friend, and the girl’s an orphan, after all, and no doubt saw the Kiowa kill her parents. She needs help.

“In Summer, Kiowa,” 1898, Frank A. Rinehart’s platinum, hand-colored print (courtesy Boston Public Library via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Johanna, as Kidd calls her, is a handful and then some. She has no use for shoes, clothes as he understands them, table manners, kindness, or conversation–not that he speaks Kiowa or that she remembers English. And yes, Johanna does try to run away. But she also possesses wilderness skills that he appreciates (except when she misuses them in embarrassing ways) and courage under fire, which tells him she’s seen armed combat. As you’d expect, over time and circumstance, the two unwilling traveling companions learn each other, a little, and protect each other a lot.

They have several adventures that don’t turn out the way they anticipate; Jiles understands how to work the “no–and furthermore.” The reason they work, however, is that each connects to Kidd’s outlook, particularly his views of the cultural and racial divides that lead people to hate perfect strangers simply for what they (apparently) represent. It’s a clear-eyed lesson and as up-to-date as you could want, but it’s also a primer on how to write a novel. The exposition of the theme and the main character’s inner life are inseparable, and this is why he’s such a winning protagonist. For Kidd, who’s seen much of life and is looking forward to rest and peace and quiet during his final years–and who therefore has a certain perspective on younger people scurrying around–the question becomes, What does it all mean?

And his answer, which fits his profession, his difficult errand, and his refusal to take himself too seriously, is very simple. “Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news.” He wonders whether each person has just one message to bring through life, which may or may not have anything to do directly with the bearer, but you have no choice. You have to carry it.

In reading News of the World, that idea gives me something to think about.

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

Feminism, No Holds Barred: The Wages of Sin

05 Monday Jun 2017

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Review: The Wages of Sin, by Kaite Welsh
Pegasus, 2017. 290 pp. $26

Sarah Gilchrist has come to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine in 1892, the first year its doors have opened to female students, and her prospects could hardly be less promising. Her parents have exiled her from her well-to-do London home for “immoral behavior,” of which she’s entirely innocent.

The main building of the University of Edinburgh medical school, completed in 1888 (courtesy Kim Traynor, 2010, via Wikimedia Commons)

But no one knows how Sarah has suffered, nor, if they asked, would they believe her. In fact, no one treats her more cruelly than her family, putting her through unspeakably barbaric, criminal horrors that she relives in nightmares. Many people go out of their way to hurt and malign her, like her aunt and uncle, with whom she lives, and whose bullying she must accept or face further punishment. At least, Sarah can talk back to the male medical students who resent the women who’ve invaded their preserve, and sometimes, even her professors. But then there are Sarah’s female classmates, the very people who should have the most sympathy, who delight in persecuting her.

Welsh excels at many things in this, her first novel. Chief of them is how she re-creates the vicious social order that imprisons not just Sarah but all women in Edinburgh, most of whom lack her advantages of wealth and social standing. It’s these women to whom Sarah dedicates herself and her education, working after hours at an infirmary in a poor neighborhood. The only thing that keeps her going is her dream of becoming a doctor, serving these people, and having a profession that will let her live in the world instead of as a cloistered wife. And she knows that one mistake, perceived or real, could cost her that dream.

So one night at the infirmary, Sarah turns away a young prostitute, Lucy, who asks for an abortion–which would have been a hanging offense for both parties–only to see the girl’s corpse soon afterward on the dissecting table in anatomy class. Sarah believes Lucy was murdered and sets out to discover who killed her, even as she recognizes that doing so may well drag her down. Not only does her quest bring her to disreputable places, she quickly arouses suspicion from a brilliant but irascible professor who’s quite capable of having her expelled from the university. Is he involved in Lucy’s death? Was he using her? These are deep waters, indeed, and Sarah learns that she’s not as good a swimmer as she thought.

In the process Welsh roils the currents, another pleasure of The Wages of Sin. Sarah should be the least worldly medical student in Edinburgh, but her sufferings and her work at the infirmary have taught her more than the others will ever know. When her female classmates pass out leaflets condemning prostitution and think themselves virtuous, Sarah scoffs in contempt:

They were so innocent. They were so lucky. They hadn’t turned away a frightened, desperate girl. They didn’t have a woman’s death on their conscience, her blood on their hands. They were little girls dressed in their teacher’s clothes, playing with women’s lives as they once played with their dolls, ignorant that all the sermonizing in the world wouldn’t save the soul of someone with a malnourished body.

As Sarah takes larger and larger risks to uncover the truth, the pressures increase from all angles. Her aunt and uncle want her to forget medicine and marry a vacuous, socially inept young man from a good family, and Sarah dares not resist openly. The irascible professor keeps running into her, alone, in places where she shouldn’t be, even chaperoned. Maybe he shouldn’t be there, either, but as a man, he has more moral latitude.

As you might guess, then, “no–and furthermore” lives large in these pages; the narrative consistently thwarts Sarah’s efforts, just when she thinks she might have gotten somewhere. For the first 90 percent of this novel, you couldn’t ask for more riveting storytelling. Throughout, Welsh has made the personal political, asked hard questions about feminism that sound as topical today as they must have seemed radical in 1892, and depicted as vivid, gritty a picture of late Victorian life as you could want.

Unfortunately, the last 10 percent nearly undoes the rest. Having pushed Sarah into a tight corner with hard-edged reality, Welsh builds her resolution on clichés. The killer turns out to have sociopathic tendencies–a cop-out and a tired convention–and is also supremely talkative, for no apparent reason other than the author’s convenience. The final confrontation feels like melodrama, a startling departure from an otherwise bold, original narrative. I think Welsh could have done better–I’m sure of it–and not just because she’s a talented writer.

But read The Wages of Sin, and you be the judge. Despite the flawed ending, I think you’ll be gripped.

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.

Nineteenth-Century Noir: By Gaslight

10 Monday Apr 2017

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Review: By Gaslight, by Steven Price
Farrar, Straus, 2016. 731 pp. $28

William Pinkerton has much more than his reputation to make a thief uneasy. Not only is he an accomplished detective, son of the famous Allan (and director of the agency that bears his name), William grasps implicitly that revenge and justice are reverse sides of the same coin, and the difference doesn’t trouble him overmuch. If a man’s a criminal, he must be stopped, and proof or evidence are mere tools toward that end. That makes Pinkerton as relentless as he is unpredictable, and if there’s one thing a careful, professional criminal dislikes, it’s an adversary who makes his own rules with the daring calculation of a fanatic.

Allan Pinkerton’s obituary in Harper’s Weekly, 1884; even in death, he cast a deep shadow on his sons (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

So it is that in 1885, Pinkerton has traveled to London to track down Edward Shade, a figure from his late father’s past. Why Pinkerton père spent so much effort trying to find Shade, whose elusiveness fits his name, isn’t entirely clear. But William has inherited the quest, which he pursues with every ounce of his considerable energy. And when the trail leads him to a woman believed to be connected to Shade, she literally slips from his grasp to throw herself in the Thames.

I wouldn’t dream of summarizing further. At 731 pages, By Gaslight is a weighty novel, but that’s like saying the pyramids are large and made of stone. Rather, imagine said pyramid built by dropping pebble upon pebble, and you have Price’s narrative technique. As you read, each mote falls into place as if there were no other suitable niche, and just when you think you might have uncovered the secret you’ve been waiting to see revealed, there’s another hidden inside. I defy anyone to start this novel and not finish it.

So I won’t tell you more about the plot, but I will mention three other characters. There’s Adam Foole, a gifted man of the “flash” (criminal) world, with a checkered past that has taken him around the globe, like as not in desperate straits. Master thief and con artist he is, but where most novelists would make such a character a likeable rogue, Price reaches higher. Foole’s neither rogue nor Robin Hood, though the men he robs are brutal types who amass wealth for its own sake and hide behind it, a tacit comparison that works in Foole’s favor. More importantly, though, love and friendship matter most to him, including his affection for his two partners in crime.

They are Japheth Fludd, a mountain of a man whose suspicious worldview provides a counterpoint to Foole’s more romantic nature, and whose bond to Foole seems at first hard to explain. But never fear; Price gets to it, eventually. Foole and Fludd look after Molly, a street urchin and pickpocket extraordinaire, whom Foole treats like the daughter he’s never had, and whom he patiently instructs in manners and the right way to treat people. They’re a marvelous triumvirate.

But a story of this heft wouldn’t take flight without winged prose, and this is where Price dazzles. A certain tone of voice is “cold and brutal as a steel cable”; William loves his wife’s name, “the aristocratic lace of its syllables, the knot it made of his tongue.” And then there’s London, which Price renders in its filth and splendor like a latter-day Dickens, minus the sentimentality:

He did not go directly in but slipped instead down a side alley. Creatures stirred in the papered windows as he passed. The alley was a river of muck and he walked carefully. In openings in the wooden walls he glimpsed the small crouched shapes of children, all bones and knees, half dressed, their breath pluming in the cold. They met his eyes boldly. The fog was thinner here, the stink more savage and bitter.

The novel ranges from England to India to South Africa to the United States, both the Western cow towns where desperadoes rob banks, and Virginia during the Civil War. (Allan Pinkerton runs spies for General George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, and William joins his father there.) But everywhere the narrative goes, you sense the place and time as if they entered through your fingertips touching the pages.

I like intricate books, though I must confess I got twisted around so that I’m not sure I understand everything in this one. But I don’t mind that as much as the two annoying tics in which Price indulges himself. By Gaslight has no quotation marks, and sometimes you have to parse out where dialogue ends and narrative resumes. He’s not alone–Lydia Peelle did the same in The Midnight Cool–but I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it. It’s as if the authors are pretending that they’re so good, their prose needs no punctuation. Silly. Similarly, Price uses commas so sparingly that his longer sentences sometimes have a breathless, full-of-themselves quality, like a more loquacious Hemingway. I don’t get that, either.

But By Gaslight isn’t just good; it’s spectacular, in every sense of the word.

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

Hustles and Bustles: To Capture What We Cannot Keep

16 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: To Capture What We Cannot Keep, by Beatrice Colin
Flatiron, 2016. 289 pp. $26

Imagine meeting the love of your life on a hot-air balloon ride, and that he happens to be the chief lieutenant to Gustave Eiffel, just then (1886) about to begin construction on the tower that will become famous. This is the engaging premise to a well-plotted, hard-edged romantic novel of literary credentials that vividly delivers both the luxury and seamy side of Paris during the Belle Époque. What more could you want?

Newspaper caricature of Gustave Eiffel, reflecting the storm of criticism for having compared his as-yet unbuillt structure to the pyramids (Le Temps, February 14, 1887; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Caricature of Gustave Eiffel, who compared his unbuilt tower to the pyramids (Le Temps, 14 February 1887; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Well, a couple things, actually, but I don’t want to carp, since I thoroughly enjoyed To Capture What We Cannot Keep and suspect that you will too. Even so, let’s get one thing out of the way, the unfortunate title, which evokes All the Light We Cannot See. Authors don’t always decide their titles, and if this one sounds like pandering, Colin succeeds in at least one respect where Anthony Doerr, her presumed predecessor, failed. There’s no treacle here, nothing that even remotely resembles it. The only obvious similarity is that both books take place in France.

Caitriona Wallace (a histrionic name, I think), is a thirty-year-old Scottish widow reduced to playing chaperone for the beloved niece and nephew of a wealthy Glaswegian industrialist on their grand tour of Europe. Shortly before the trio are to leave Paris, Caitriona, known as Cait, takes that fateful balloon ride and meets–or sort of meets–Émile Noguier, an engineer whose direct appraisal seems less than wholly gentlemanly and thus very exciting.

And so things turns out, but, as in any worthwhile romance, the course of true love never does run smooth. The memory of Cait’s marriage pains her, but where most people assume that her husband’s untimely death is what troubles her, that’s not what hurts most, the details of which take a good while to emerge. More importantly, though Cait recognizes the unfairness behind the sexual double standard and dislikes corsets and bustles, she feels bound to uphold propriety, especially since her two young charges are determined to find trouble. As for Émile, he too feels pressured, with a domineering mother and a family tradition on one side, and a taste for Montmartre artists’ models on the other.

I like how Colin uses Paris, a city she understands and loves, to embody her characters’ outlook and desires:

Children threw rocks into dirty brown puddles, while girls only a few years older, with strings of imitation pearls around their necks and jewels of rain in their hair, waited in doorways for customers. It had shocked Cait at first, the poverty, the brazenness with which young women sold themselves, the casual attitude toward destitution and morality.

For Émile, building the tower, to him a work of art unlike any known before, requires a lot of ugliness before beauty can arise:

The men had quarried down through damp clay and wet sand, through mud studded with broken crockery and shards of glass, with splinters of animal bone and flakes of flint, and now the air reeked of decayed things, of sulfur and rot. Cutting across everything, however, making your eyes water and the world intermittently gray and indistinct, were clouds of woodsmoke. The fires seemed to burn day and night, purifying and polluting in equal measure.

With prose like this and a keen eye for psychological moments, Colin conveys the fullness of her protagonists’ inner lives and how convention keeps them from seeking what will make them happy. Several secondary characters also emerge in full, such as a conniving beauty of easy virtue and a gift for manipulating the naive, and Eiffel himself–narcissistic, generous, but always looking out for number one. Colin turns a few clichés inside out and keeps you guessing as to the resolution; “no; and furthermore” flourishes here.

But sometimes to resolve the obstacles she places, she leans on a minor contrivance or two of her own, most particularly the cardboard niece and nephew. Alice is a twit of great beauty but no culture or manners who seems completely obsessed with getting engaged at age nineteen. If she’s to be a twit, at least she can show some individuality about it. Ditto her brother Jamie, a spendthrift wastrel who causes a great deal of harm without even trying.

Finally, I wish Colin had fleshed out one point of history, a scandal regarding an attempt to build a canal in Panama, which ruined Ferdinand de Lesseps, entrepreneur behind the Suez Canal, and almost dragged down Eiffel too. The failure bankrupted an entire swath of French society, involved government bribery–causing no end of trouble for the still-young Third Republic–and incited a wave of anti-Semitism. I understand why Colin didn’t want to get enmeshed in the Panama affair, yet I think she might have hinted at how deeply the scandal roiled the country, beyond mere mention of lost fortunes and how Eiffel suddenly lost his social cachet.

All the same, To Capture What We Cannot Keep will satisfy legions of readers.

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

Degas and Cassatt: I Always Loved You

02 Monday Jan 2017

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Review: I Always Loved You, by Robin Oliveira
Viking, 2014. 343 pp. $28

In 1877, the painter Mary Cassatt has reached a crossroads. The official Paris salon has just rejected her work, yet again, leading her to question whether her dream of being a painter is an egoistic fantasy. Back in Pennsylvania, her father thinks so, and since he’s supporting her life in Europe, he also thinks that gives him the right to tell his daughter–now in her early thirties–that it’s time to give up her foolishness and settle down to what a woman’s supposed to do. Not that she disagrees, entirely; Mary loves children and would like to have a husband and family, all other things being equal.

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893-94, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893-94, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

But they’re not equal. With few exceptions, notably Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet’s sister-in-law, a vivid character here, women don’t paint. They adorn canvases, share artists’ beds, offer admiration, and otherwise stay out of the way. Mary, as a foreigner, a real talent, and a woman unwilling to walk ten paces behind anyone, poses a threat to the fraternity of French painters, as a professional and a prospective marriage partner.

At this critical juncture, when the personal and artistic paths seem blocked, Cassatt meets an artist she’s long admired, Edgar Degas. Right away, he tells her that she can paint but is wasting herself trying to ape accepted styles rather than find her own. To be successful, she must serve her obsession, whatever great theme drives her to put brush to canvas. These words electrify her, as does his rigorous devotion to his art, and since he despises social convention, he takes her more seriously as a fellow professional than many of their contemporaries.

However, the social conventions Degas despises include sensitivity toward others, generosity, courtesy, kindness, keeping promises, or pulling together toward a common goal. He also has no love for anything or anyone other than himself and his art. Cassatt couldn’t be more different, so you know that whatever these two artists mean to one another, it will be a bumpy ride.

Then again, this is Paris, and the characters who populate this novel are artists–vain, gifted, self-doubting, jealous, often careless of others’ feelings. Oliveira excels at portraying this atmosphere, in which only the thick-skinned survive, and half the battle is knowing when not to put skin on the line. Consider this social gathering:

Soon after, the men abandoned their plates for the candlelit corner next to the piano, where a few rested their elbows on its ebony skin and the rest sprawled in armchairs, twirling their delicate flutes of amber champagne, which they held by their stems. No one spoke, but they eyed one another as if waiting for a starting gun, boredom and anticipation warring on their spectral faces as the flickering candlelight painted shadows on the wall. Someone lit a cigar. Mary moved to join them, but Berthe motioned to her to sit beside her on a brocade loveseat away from the men.

This tableau is like a painting, which could be titled Just Before the Verbal Fireworks. In what follows, Mary subtly bests Émile Zola, one way she proves that she belongs. But her struggle is never-ending, because that’s the artist’s lot, whether within herself, her profession, or society at large. I have to think the author is talking about writers too when she has Degas and Cassatt wrestle constantly with the “unbidden terror”: whether their work is as good as they think and hope it is, and whether the right touch will suddenly desert them, if it hasn’t already.

The stakes increase for Cassatt when her father decides to move the family back to Paris (they had lived there in Mary’s youth). Though Robert Cassatt is no longer telling her to pack up her easel and come home to Pennsylvania, he’s an impossible man, and he’s there all the time. Demanding, selfish, self-absorbed, and dedicated to the proposition that if something doesn’t make money, it’s not worth doing, he’s poison for his long-suffering daughter, who expends much energy standing up to him.

That she’s had to deal with him all her life makes her a match for Degas, whose faults loom large in these pages. Thanks to Oliveira’s fully rounded portrayal, I understand him. But I don’t like him one bit, and you have to wonder why Cassatt still bothers with him long after he’s burned her, and others, many times. There are other excellent artists within her circle, and she must have met many kinder, more sensitive men. Why, then, her fascination with a selfish boor?

As an art lover, though, I admit my biases. Degas’s work has always seemed repetitive to me–ballerinas and bathers–and it’s hard to get around his rabid anti-Semitism, though, to be fair, Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir shared that prejudice. On the other hand, having seen too few of Cassatt’s paintings, I’d always thought of her as a minor artist, until I visited the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., a year ago. She’s very much the real deal–Degas was right about that–and I Always Loved You does her justice.

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