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Love, Theft, Hate: The Sisters of Summit Avenue

18 Monday Nov 2019

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Review: The Sisters of Summit Avenue, by Lynn Cullen
Gallery, 2019. 312 pp. $27

Coming of age in 1920s Indiana with barely a penny to their names and kindly but incompetent parents, sisters June and Ruth are fiercely attached but deadly competitive. Elder June, the popular girl, the beauty, the one with artistic talent, wants to escape their drab existence, to make something of herself. Bookish Ruth, deemed less capable, less everything, wants the attention she believes she’s never received. Accordingly, throughout their lives together, whatever June gets, Ruth wants. Shortly before Ruth’s eighteenth birthday, she settles on June’s fiancé, John, as her next goal.

But though Ruth marries John and settles down on his family farm, by 1934, she’s up against it. A heretofore rare form of encephalitis that has swept the country in the 1930s has left John mostly comatose. Their farm is failing, Ruth struggles to raise four kids, and her mother, who lives with them, is too lost in dreams of a past that never existed to have much to offer.

Marjorie Husted, the actress who portrayed Betty Crocker on the radio, ca. 1944 (courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, “Fight Food Waste in the Home,” Office for Emergency Management, Office of War Information; via Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, June has married a successful doctor, a cheerful, controlling narcissist, Richard Whiteleather (now, there’s a name) and lives in a mansion in St. Paul, Minnesota. June has jewels, fashionable dresses, and a country-club membership, but she remains insecure about her origins, and she’s childless, which breaks her heart. She has a job with the flour company, answering the tons of letters lonely, frustrated, harried women write to Betty Crocker — an advertising logo, not a real person — and working up the recipes and pamphlets distributed in her name. You can guess what Ruth thinks of her sister’s job:

In between giving out recipes, Betty tipped off her followers on how to win a husband and keep him, not only by taking the proverbial shortcut through his stomach, but by keeping themselves attractive and interesting. Betty, with her on-air interviews with bachelors about what they looked for in a wife and her ten-cent booklets full of man-pleasing recipes, implied that men were like dumb beasts running free on the plains, unaware that they were being stalked, until, bang! they were shot down by “Apricot Topsy-Turvy” or “Peeps and Squeals Sandwiches,” served by a perky huntress in an apron. She wondered how her sister could live with herself, contributing to this nonsense. Of course, Sister June had always been a big game hunter.

Not only does Ruth resent June for earning money through artifice, while she herself struggles to farm (presumably raising the wheat that makes the flour), she hates it all the more that June sends her every penny she earns. Ruth, who stole John from June, has to watch while crippling illness steals him back. June, who suffers from Richard’s self-centeredness, envies Ruth’s ability to have children by the man they both love, even though he’s now lost to the world.

The family dynamic reveals so much by itself, you understand their world, no explanation required. Combine weak parents, rivalry for attention, ambivalent attachment, and thwarted desires, and you see why, for example, either sister would want John, a kind person but a man incapable of asserting himself.

However, I wish Cullen didn’t tell feelings so often when they really matter; she’s more than capable of showing them. I also wish she’d built the novel more coherently, especially in the first third, when the narrative leaps back and forth from decade to decade in three different narrator’s heads. There’s a lot of back story to cover, and no doubt Cullen settled on this narrative form after trying others, but it takes a while for the central event to occur, a visit to Ruth’s farm by June and Richard, which leads to confrontations everyone has been avoiding forever.

Still, Cullen’s keen, subtle sense of human psychology wins the day, and you can see how family resentments and foolishly kept secrets have cascaded through the years. As a storyteller, she knows how to employ emotional “no — and furthermore,” in which internal narrative, triggered by mundane events, ratchets up the tension. This requires no manipulation or contrivance: It’s character-driven narrative at its best.

That is, until the end, which I find implausible. Partly, that’s because Cullen has done such a fine job pushing her characters into tight corners that redemption is no longer an option. I don’t want to give anything away, of course, but to take one minor example, consider that Richard, the egotistical doctor, might not be so pliable a character as that. Such people don’t change easily; and, further, there’s a wonderful scene in which June’s mother-in-law freely talks about her son’s unbounded greed for what he wants. Mother knows best, I think.

If you can love ninety percent of a novel and slap your head in consternation at the remaining ten percent, that’s how I feel about The Sisters of Summit Avenue. Read it for the terrific character studies; but I think the author, who has done brilliantly portraying messy lives, may have tried to tidy up too much.

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

Vienna Blood: The Second Rider

08 Monday Apr 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keys and Corpses: The Locksmith’s Daughter

24 Monday Dec 2018

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Review: The Locksmith’s Daughter, by Karen Brooks
Morrow, 2018. 551 pp. $17

Following a shame and scandal that took her away from her parents in London, Mallory Bright returns, hoping to hide herself as an assistant to her father, a locksmith. But it’s 1580, and according to the mores of Elizabethan England, locksmithing is no trade for a woman, nor should Mallory have received a scholar’s education, including ancient and modern languages. However, her father’s old friend, Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s secretary, witnesses Mallory’s talent for picking locks, and he realizes what a weapon she’d be in his campaign against Catholic subversives. The previous years have seen a not-entirely-covert war against those whom, rightly or wrongly, Sir Francis and the crown see as plotters to subvert Protestantism in England and topple Elizabeth from her throne.

Portrait of Sir Francis Walsingham, ca. 1585, attributed to John de Critz (courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons)

Walsingham has long fascinated novelists and historians, and no wonder; he may have been the first national spymaster in history. Here, I find Mallory’s connection to him contrived, and her background even less credible, while her scandalous past is nothing less than operatic. But if you can get past that, The Locksmith’s Daughter offers a few pleasures, chief of which is sixteenth-century London, which Brooks has in the palm of her hand. Whether it’s common attitudes, daily routine, the casual way the law treats human life, scenery, or details of dress, she puts you right there:

Up ahead, a pack of dogs barked as a butcher unhooked the gutted pig strung up outside his premises, a swarm of flies lifting from the gray flash as he hoisted it over his shoulder and leveled kicks and curses at the hounds. Nearby, a flower seller chatted to an old sailor with a wooden stump where his left leg should be. We entered an area I once walked with confidence and I stayed close to Angela, who’d begun to hum the ditty drifting from a nearby tavern.

“No — and furthermore” seeps through these pages, which, though many, fly by. Conflict abounds, whether moral, political, or amorous, and Mallory’s closest friend, Caleb, is an actor-playwright, always good for color and theme (artifice, romance, deception). The adventures that Mallory undertakes for Sir Francis are truly hair-raising, and none go as planned. Many people die as a result of his efforts, some quite horribly. The serpentine plot forces Mallory to rethink everything she’s ever believed, and she’s never far from confrontation and recrimination, even if she sometimes narrowly escapes them — for now. There’s even a rakish, passionate peer, Lord Nathaniel Warham, Caleb’s patron, who takes a keen interest in Mallory and seems to see through her.

But despite these promising elements, to me, The Locksmith’s Daughter fails to deliver. Brooks’s style involves too much tell, not enough show. After doing such a marvelous job setting up crackling conflicts, she douses them with generic responses, whether sentences like, “Wonder and terror coursed down my spine,” or scads of rhetorical questions (“Did I make a mistake? What could I have done?”) The author wants us to believe that Mallory, though an exceptional woman for her time, is still at least partly in thrall to common views of gender roles. Fair enough, but rhetorical questions don’t prove that; Mallory needs to show it, not just entertain it, and whenever she criticizes herself for stepping beyond her role or her station, I don’t believe her. This split between the world she dreams of and the one she lives in is a difficult point of character to convey, but it’s crucial. And though I know what Brooks is trying to say, Mallory’s words and thoughts in those moments seem handed to her rather than coming from within. It’s as though she were a member of Caleb’s acting troupe, speaking her lines.

The romance, too, feels a little forced. The reader knows right away that Lord Nathaniel has fallen for Mallory, and when this notion finally occurs to her, it’s obvious that the lady doth protest too much. She would be easier to believe if they quarreled more often about anything substantive, rather than who insulted whom, and there are plenty of contentious issues floating around, not least religious persecution. Naturally, he rescues her at key moments, which disappoints this feminist reader, but it’s also the way he (and others) come to her aid, revealing that they knew a particular secret all along and have acted accordingly. It’s a shame that such an able storyteller should resort to melodrama, but perhaps she knows her audience and figures that skeptics like me aren’t part of it.

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.

For a Thousand Pounds: Golden Hill

02 Monday Oct 2017

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Review: Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford
Scribner, 2016. 302 pp. $26

“There is something maddeningly predictable about the way you procure disaster, Richard,” a friend tells the protagonist of this bold, extraordinary novel. “It is like someone winding a clock, as methodical as that. . . .”

That, at least, is the sympathetic view of Richard from within the insular community (population: seven thousand) of New-York in 1746, which is to say, lower Manhattan. The less sympathetic, more common, view of Richard Smith is that he’s a bounder, a fraud, a swindler. But the fault lies largely with New-York and less with Smith, despite the man’s willingness to admit mistakes; society’s indictments reflect more on the accusers than the accused. That’s the brilliance of Golden Hill, in which the central character is more reliable than the rest, and the disasters that accrue have more to do with society’s wrong-headed suppositions and cruel, inequitable laws.

Thomas Davies’s drawing of New York City, ca. 1770, perhaps from the perspective of Long Island. The steeple of Trinity Church is visible in the background (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The premise is elegantly simple, the sort I admire. Richard Smith, twenty-three, lands in New-York fresh from England and immediately proceeds to Lovell & Company, on Golden Hill Street, where he presents a draft for a thousand pounds. Lovell doesn’t have such an enormous sum in hard money, though Mr. Lovell could procure it in goods, over time. But Smith wants cash. He won’t say why, what business he has, or why he came to the colonies to pursue it. Both self-interest and a merchant’s natural skepticism for the abstract prompt Lovell to imagine that Smith is playing an elaborate and potentially expensive hoax. Yet the newcomer presents a document that appears genuine, from a London concern with which Lovell has done business for years. Moreover, Smith argues a credible case, and his charm, good looks, and quick wit make a strong impression. Even so, Smith will have to wait until London confirms the draft. This is only fair.

All New-York waits with him and watches his every move. To possess such a large fortune, even theoretically, makes Smith an object of intense curiosity, no less the means by which he claims it and his polite, repeated refusals to explain his intentions. Opinions and motives are freely imputed to him, and every misstep becomes a reason for laughter, condemnation, or, conversely, temporary alliance with a political faction hoping to use him for its own advantage. But, on the chance that he’s who he says he is, no one can afford to reject him categorically. Rather, Smith is swept up into the highest circles right away, starting with Lovell’s household, which includes two marriageable daughters.

The elder, Tabitha, intrigues Smith. To onlookers, that in itself causes laughter and amazement, for Tabitha Lovell has a misanthropically sharp tongue and seems to enjoy making herself unpleasant. But Golden Hill is about freedom, real and imaginary. Smith has astutely deduced that Tabitha is a prisoner of her fears as much as she indulges the freedom to taunt everyone else, and he attempts to draw her out and show her he empathizes.

However, empathy is a commodity in short supply, even scarcer than self-knowledge. The friend who tells Smith that he “procures disaster” lays out the situation this way:

This is a place where things can get out of hand very quick: and often do. You would think, talking to the habitants, that all the vices and crimes of humanity had been left behind on the other shore. Take ’em as they take themselves, and they are the innocentest shopkeepers, placid and earnest, plucked by a lucky fortune out from corruption. But the truth is that they are wild, suspicious, combustible–and the devil to govern. . . . In all their relations they are prompt to peer and gaze for the hidden motive, the worm in the apple, the serpent in the garden they insist their New World to be.

Spufford is tweaking the American pretense of virtue–someone should, especially these days–but there’s much more to this passage than that. Smith’s friend is warning him that nothing will happen in a straight line, and indeed, it doesn’t. Twists and turns abound; if ever there was proof that “no–and furthermore” belongs in literary novels, not just suspense, Golden Hill is Exhibit A. But Spufford is also framing his themes: the hypocrisy concerning sexual standards, social class, wealth, race, and rule of law that emerge between the lines of this mesmerizing narrative and force the reader to ask what freedom means.

Finally, the passage suggests the tone of Golden Hill, whose vocabulary, cadences, and attitudes lovingly reflect and re-create an eighteenth-century picaresque. Spufford has wisely refrained from slavishly imitating Tobias Smollett (whom he quotes in an epigraph) or Henry Fielding, but he’s written in a form recognizably similar, and he adopts their style and form in pitch-perfect fashion.

Golden Hill is a masterpiece. That’s all there is to it.

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

As the Losses Mount: Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

29 Monday Aug 2016

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Review: Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, by Chris Cleave
Simon & Schuster, 2016. 424 pp. $27

This novel is hardly the first about a love triangle in wartime, but if it’s not the best of the genre in recent memory, it’s pretty damn close.

Mary North, a young woman at odds with her stuffy London family, hastens home from a Swiss finishing school in September 1939, just after Britain declares war. She wants to “do something,” so she badgers the War Office, assuming that her services must be required, maybe as a secret agent. After all, her father’s an MP, perhaps destined for a cabinet post, so why not? Nobody really knows what the war will be like, but eighteen-year-old Mary is very sure that for her, it will involve duty, freedom, and a ripping lark. In other words, Mary has the makings of an absolutely insufferable, overprivileged twit–and yet she’s quite the opposite.

 

Bomb damage in Valletta, Malta, May 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Bomb damage in Valletta, Malta, May 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Two traits save her, in my eyes. First, she’s delightfully subversive, willing to challenge commonly held beliefs in herself and others, and does so with wit and style. Second, she tries to live by her discoveries, working around the rules whenever necessary–a free spirit who becomes increasingly aware how much her ability to be one derives from her wealth and social position.

Mary finds a job as a teacher, where her readiness to see things from the children’s point of view makes her an asset. For instance, the day they’re to be evacuated from London (a war measure), her charges exchange their name tags the moment she turns her back. Being who she is, she pretends that their new names are the correct ones, which amuses them no end. “It turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.” But Mary’s superiors think she’s unfit to teach–too much levity and sympathy, flouting the rules–so they fire her.

Are we downhearted? Only for a moment. Mary lobbies Tom Shaw, an administrator who grants her the use of an abandoned school, where she plans to teach those children shunted back from the countryside, spurned because of their skin color, emotional disabilities, or neediness. Mary throws herself into rescuing these kids and, shortly afterward, into Tom’s arms as well.

Meanwhile, however, Tom’s good friend Alistair, an officer who barely survived the Battle of France and was evacuated from Dunkirk, has come home to London on leave. (Notice the recurring theme of evacuation and rescue, and who deserves it, or doesn’t.) By happenstance, the day Alistair ships out again, Mary brings him his duffel bag at the train station. Cleave, in the simple, elegant prose that makes this novel shine, describes the feeling between them:

She laughed then, brightly and without complication, and he laughed too, and for a moment the war with its lachrymose smoke was blown away on a bright, clean wind. Alistair marveled that she could do such a thing with the tiniest inflection of her mouth and the lightest look in her eye: even exhausted, in yesterday’s dress with her hair disheveled, she could make the distance between them disappear.

Consequently, it’s no secret that while enduring the terrible, grinding, years-long siege of Malta, Alistair thinks of Mary and his friend Tom in different, not always selfless, ways. What eventually happens is anything but predictable, even if it seems so at first, because Cleave is master of my favorite literary device, the “no; and furthermore.” Just when you think things are settled, they’re not–they get even worse–and no one’s off the hook. Some readers may object to the unflinching nature of the narrative, which deals out plenty of pain and leaves quite a few prejudices intact. But I urge you to read Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, precisely because these characters earn every drop of joy they get. Along the way, Cleave treats you to terrific dialogue, much of it darkly funny, and pitch-perfect descriptions of new love, intense desperation, and loss. The characterizations feel true in every respect, save one (I don’t believe that Mary’s only eighteen at the novel’s beginning, and she doesn’t act like the virgin she’s supposed to be).

I’ve heard some people call this book same-old, same-old, or too sentimental. Don’t believe them. Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is a wrenching novel, one of the finest I’ve read this year.

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

Those Double-Crossing de Medicis: The Red Lily Crown

11 Monday Jul 2016

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Review: The Red Lily Crown, by Elizabeth Loupas
NAL, 2014. 418 pp. $16

It’s April 1574, and Florence braces for the death of one de Medici grand duke, Cosimo, and the accession of another, Francesco. It’s common knowledge that the heir apparent has two interests, women and alchemy, and the skinny is that he’ll be a crafty, intemperate ruler–just like his forbears, in other words, except more so.

Bronzino's portrait of Francesco de Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, 1567? (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Bronzino’s portrait of Francesco de Medici; 1567? (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But such thoughts are secondary for Chiara Nerini, the fifteen-year-old daughter of an alchemist and bookseller who immolated himself searching for the Philosopher’s Stone. Alchemy fascinates Chiara as well, and her father’s laboratory has many treasures in it:

It was fantastical, disconnected from hunger, hunger, hunger, worn-out clothes and winter cold, as mysterious as if it had been created by some kind of magic. There was an athanor made of brick and clay from Trebizond–wherever that was–and a green glass alembic in the shape of a crescent moon. There was a gold-and-crystal double pelican and a silver funnel engraved with an intricate circular labyrinth design, supposedly a thousand years old.

But tragedy as well as poverty has dogged the family; her mother is dead, and horsemen ran over and killed Chiara’s brother, knocking her on the head too, a blow that still causes her headaches and fainting spells. She and her two surviving sisters live with their grandmother, a woman of republican sympathies who ill conceals her contempt for the ruling house. Nevertheless, Chiara has taken it upon herself to sell off her late father’s equipment, and who better to buy it than Francesco de Medici?

However, even to approach the great man is a dangerous gambit, and she’s nearly trampled again in the attempt. But she’s also lucky that Ruanno, an English alchemist working for Francesco, recognizes the worth of the object she has brought to sell–except that when de Medici sees it, and her, he makes a proposition she can’t refuse. Chiara is to remain in his house as a servant and assist in his laboratory, where he’s trying to create the Philosopher’s Stone. He believes that to succeed, he needs someone to represent the feminine principle, and she’s nominated. If she passes several tests to prove she’s a virgin , she’ll work alongside Ruanno and the grand duke, and her family will receive food, money, and gifts. But if Chiara fails the tests or breaks her vow, she’ll die. Simple.

This chain of events illustrates the key strength of The Red Lily Crown. You’ll notice that each twist in the story corresponds to a “yes, but,” the parallel structure to the “no–and furthermore” common to thrillers but also appearing in well-plotted novels of other genres. In the “no–and furthermore,” the protagonist thinks she’ll get what she’s looking for, only to fail and be presented with an even worse problem. Here, Loupas relies on a different sort of complication. Yes, Chiara sells her father’s equipment, but Francesco co-opts her. Yes, that has its advantages but could also prove fatal. Later in the novel, the author employs the “no–and furthermore” too; but to set the stage, she’s content to lead Chiara into a labyrinth.

De Medici drives the tension, changing minute to minute, leaving everyone around him to wonder what he really wants, what he’s got on them, and what they can or can’t get away with. I find him a bit much, vicious and selfish beyond belief, and the information that his parents persecuted him doesn’t quite balance the portrayal. But Loupas re-creates the Medici court, its intrigues, affairs, murders, and rituals, with a sure hand. I believe that part.

I have more trouble crediting certain plot turns, well done though they are, especially the de Medici arsenal of poisons. You know that Ruanno, who seems too good to be true, and Chiara will attract one another, so that’s no surprise, though Loupas keeps you guessing as to how it will unfold. I wish she hadn’t rushed important transitions in the romance, and it seems as if Chiara can read his thoughts whenever she wishes, a telepathy to be envied.

But I like a good story, and The Red Lily Crown is one.

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

Deception: The Paris Winter

27 Monday Jun 2016

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Review: The Paris Winter, by Imogen Robertson
St. Martin’s, 2013. 360 pp. $26

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But Maud Heighton, the protagonist of this excellent thriller set in 1909, can’t help herself. She’s slowly starving in Paris, garden of earthly delights, while learning to become a painter at l’Académie Lafond. All Maud’s classmates are women, which keeps predatory bohemians out, but Lafond charges his female students double what he would if they were male–the image of respectability costs extra, you see.

Quai de Passy, Paris, during the flood of 1910 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Quai de Passy, Paris, during the flood of 1910 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Not that anyone of the male persuasion believes in that respectability; Maud’s brother, a lawyer back in England, disapproves of his sister’s choice to live in that sinful city, and many men freely offer their opinion that art is a masculine preserve. So as Maud’s meager funds drip away to finance her education, and as she covertly lunches on the tiny cakes served at class sessions, she’s terribly alone. She loves Paris, but it’s out of reach–and so is Maud, a proper Englishwoman who keeps her distance, living in her books and sketch pads.

In the full light of day Paris was chic and confident. The polished shops were filled with colour and temptation and on every corner was a scene worth painting. It was modern without being vulgar, tasteful without being rigid or dull. A parade of elegant originality. Only in this hour, just before dawn on a winter’s morning, did the city seem a little haggard, a little stale. . . . The streets were almost empty–only the occasional man, purple in the face and stale with smoke and drink, hailing a cab in the Place Pigalle, or the old women washing out the gutters with stiff-brushed brooms.

But Maud can’t remain impervious and aloof forever. Tanya Koltsova, a wealthy Russian classmate from Lafond’s, befriends her, determined to show her a good time and feed her enough to restore color to her cheeks. Naturally, Maud’s too proud to accept charity, but through Tanya, she learns of a situation as a lady’s companion. Sylvie Morel, a pale, blonde beauty with a sensual face who could have stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite painting by Edward Burne-Jones, is very sickly, and her older brother wants someone to coax her into the world and help her gain her strength. How perfect for Maud; it’s precisely what she needs for herself. In return for her room, board, and a princely wage, all she need do is entice Sylvie away from her sickbed, teaching her English and giving her drawing lessons.

There are complications, however. As Morel confides, Sylvie is addicted to opium, which he indulges within limits, hoping to wean her off the drug. Yet he praises Maud’s efforts to get her out and about and insists that he can see real progress.

Then a madwoman pounds on the door one day when Morel’s out–as he usually is–and forces her way into the apartment. Morel’s a thief, the woman declares, and Sylvie’s not his sister but his wife. The Morels have ruined her life, besmirched her good name. Naturally, Maud can’t believe a word and is horrified that she couldn’t ward her off; luckily, the concierge and her husband arrive in time and threw the madwoman out.

I probably don’t have to tell you that things unravel quickly from there, and that the Morels aren’t who they seem. The Paris Winter tells a gut-wrenching, dark story while exploring the theme of how money imprisons people who have too little or too much of it. I like the storytelling very much–Robertson makes skillful use of “no; and furthermore”–and most of her characters, who come from all walks of life. Tanya’s poor-little-rich-girl act wears at times, and I wish the author had given her more than a good heart, a taste for beautiful dresses, and a quest for what it means to marry for love. A worldview, maybe? But the weak link here is the Morels, who seem like sociopaths (especially Sylvie), and, as I’ve said before, I dislike thrillers or mysteries in which the villainy comes purely from psychological distortion.

Even so, I enjoyed The Paris Winter immensely.

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

The Burdens of Intimacy: The Ways of the World

30 Sunday Aug 2015

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Review: The Ways of the World, by Robert Goddard
Grove/Atlantic, 2013. 404 pp. $25

Halfway through this engaging thriller, a Japanese diplomat observes, “An invisible opponent is the hardest to judge. Is he cleverer than we think or not as clever as we fear?”

To his listener–and the reader–that’s the rub. While investigating his father’s suspicious death, James Maxted is working blind, whereas every move he makes stands out as plain as day to an ever-increasing array of interested onlookers. Are they friends or enemies? Or could they be both, depending on the circumstances?

But let’s start at the beginning. The time is March 1919; the place, the Maxted family estate, near Epsom, England. James, known to all but his family as Max, has recently been repatriated from a German prison camp, where the former fighter pilot spent a lengthy stint. However, it’s a tense homecoming, for Max has never gotten along with his family, and his father has just died. Sir Henry Maxted, a career diplomat working in a minor capacity at the Paris Peace Conference, has fallen off a roof, in what the Paris police are wont to call an accident. James and his elder brother, Ashley–Sir Ashley, now, and proud of it–are to fetch his body home for burial.

Now, you don’t really believe that an experienced member of the Foreign Office would just happen to tumble off a seven-story Montparnasse apartment building while–coincidentally–the great powers were meeting to reconfigure the postwar world? I didn’t think you would, but what’s important is that James doesn’t, either. Despite his elder brother’s impatience–nothing must encumber Sir Ashley’s smooth inheritance of land and title–James sets out to learn the truth.

Lloyd George of Great Britain, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, Georges Clemenceau of France, and President Woodrow Wilson, in Paris, 1919 (Courtesy Library of Congress).

David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Woodrow Wilson of the United States, in Paris, 1919 (Courtesy Library of Congress).

And what a complicated truth it is, which reveals to Max more about his father than he’d have ever suspected, and of the often dirty profession he followed. First of all, there’s Corinne Dombreux, the lovely, young woman who lives in that Montparnasse apartment. Her late husband was spying for the Russian monarchy. Or was it the Bolsheviks, and was he playing a double game? Either way, the French security service considers Mme. Dombreux a potential enemy; her connection to Sir Henry opens up all sorts of unfortunate scenarios, as Max only gradually becomes aware.

This is where Goddard excels. He unfolds his narrative like a jeweler, one facet at time, and just when you think you might have glimpsed the extent of the stone, he shows you another facet, and another, until you’re not sure just how big it is, or how many reflections it casts. That, of course, is Max’s viewpoint too, and just as you don’t know whom to trust, neither does he. First appearances always deceive, except concerning Max; his unpleasant brother and sister-in-law; and Sam Twentyman, his former sergeant and would-be business partner. Reversals and double-crosses, the necessary “no–and furthermore” I so admire, spill from the pages.

Yet The Ways of the World doesn’t satisfy me, and though I’m glad I read it, I’m unlikely to follow the series further. (Both the cover and the last page promise more adventures.) I share Goddard’s love for intricacy, and I’m always ready for a good yarn, but I think the author gets ahead of himself, so that, at times, the machinery of The Ways of the World clanks like a rough-firing engine, when it should tick like a watch. For instance, many, many bodies fall, which feels both excessively gruesome and a pat way of ratcheting up the tension. Also, I thought Goddard rescued the good guys rather too easily a couple times, and the ending feels like a cop-out.

I was further disappointed not to see Paris. There are plenty of place names and métro stations, but those details don’t make up the city; the narrative could have taken place anywhere. Not everyone can be Alan Furst or Robert Harris (or should be), but I’d have liked color, sense of 1919–and fewer French characters who happen to speak impeccable English.

I’d love to find a first-class thriller about the Paris Peace Conference. The Ways of the World isn’t it; it’s good, but I doubt it will stay with me.

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

Befuddled Nobility: Plague Land

19 Thursday Feb 2015

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The death of Wat Tyler, who led a peasant revolt in 1381. Richard II is the crowned horseman addressing the crowd. (Library Royal MS 18.E.i-ii f. 175; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The death of Wat Tyler, who led a peasant revolt in 1381. Richard II is the crowned horseman addressing the crowd. (Library Royal MS 18.E.i-ii f. 175; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Review: Plague Land, by S. D. Sykes

Pegasus, 2015. 336 pages. $26

Imagine a family in which a selectively deaf mother floats in and out of lucidity; the daughter never smiles and spends all her time listening at keyholes; and the younger son, the man of the house at age eighteen, isn’t up to the job. Sounds like today’s dysfunctional family, right?

Well, in S. D. Sykes’s hands, the year is 1350, the place is Kent, and the boy, Oswald de Lacy, is the new lord of the manor, Somershill. Oswald can’t tame his late father’s horse, doesn’t know the first thing about sheep-shearing, and has little or no authority over his tenants. That’s because he’s spent his young life at a monastery, studying Roger Bacon and Aristotle, and acquiring a taste for rational thought, atheism, and surprisingly democratic ideas.

No, Plague Land isn’t a lift from Monty Python or Blackadder. It’s a well-plotted mystery and coming-of-age story, replete with credibly rendered fourteenth-century sights, sounds, and smells. A girl has been found murdered and her body mutilated, and the peasantry, incited by a demagogue priest, are all too ready to ascribe the crime to witchcraft. Oswald, pushed to investigate by his sense of right and wrong and the wishes of his confessor and lifelong tutor, Brother Peter, sets out to investigate.

Along the way, Oswald suffers many reversals and embarrassments, not least that his belief in observation and proof sets the population against him, and that he must persuade rather than command. Though this is Sykes’s first novel, she deploys the “no–and furthermore” device with great skill, increasing the obstacles in milord’s way at every turn. Nothing comes easily, and the providential accidents that rescue sleuths in lesser novels don’t happen here. Theories about whodunit change constantly (and plausibly), and Oswald can trust nobody, not even the advice of Brother Peter, whose schemes to get his protegé out of trouble constantly backfire.

All that makes good storytelling, but maybe a little too good. As Oswald remarks, he is lord of the manor, damn it, so why don’t people obey? It’s that frustration which, at the start, made me wonder whether Sykes intended a parody after all. But she’s serious, and a historical note explains her reasoning. Atheists and rational thinkers did exist in 1350, she says, though they were obviously a tiny minority. Further, the bubonic plague of the preceding years had upset the social order so drastically that tenant farmers sometimes had room to demand certain rights.

Maybe, but Plague Land stretches these notions pretty far. I accept that the plague has killed Oswald’s father and older brothers, giving the young lord his inheritance by surprise, and depleted the ranks of peasantry and servants, putting the estate in financial jeopardy. But the extent to which Oswald lacks a grip on things or can exercise a power he doesn’t feel he owns–the coming-of-age narrative–seems, well, modern.

Plague or no, I have to think that when Lord Somershill gives an order, bumbler though he may be, the peasantry should hop to. Nor should he be able to marry a commoner, which he believes he can, a startling concept in 1850, let alone 1350. Unusually sophisticated, especially for an eighteen-year-old, he’s never so confused that he doesn’t know what his feelings are, even if they war inside him. That, like the language, strikes me as too modern.

Still, Plague Land is good fun, and I gather that Sykes plans more novels about Oswald de Lacy. I’ll be interested to see how the series develops.

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