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Boy Meets Girl: The Golden Age

15 Monday May 2017

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Review: The Golden Age, by Joan London
Europa, 2016. 221 pp. $17

Unlike nearly all their extended family, twelve-year-old Frank Gold and his parents survived the Holocaust in Hungary, after which they emigrated to Perth, Western Australia, in 1946. But shortly afterward, Frank comes down with polio, a cruel blow that overwhelms his mother and father, neither of whom has much capacity for warmth or emotional expression, which leaves the boy struggling to find a reason to live or to hope. He’s a cynical lad, in some ways, too clever for his own good, though what’s underneath is raw and vulnerable. But he needs an outlet for those feelings, and he’s unlikely to find one without help.

Perth, Western Australia, as it appeared around 1955 (courtesy E. W. Digby, via Wikemedia Commons)

At the Golden Age, a small institution devoted to young polio victims, Frank, now almost thirteen, meets Elsa Briggs, six months younger than he. Until she was stricken, Elsa was a happy, radiant child, joyful and self-directed. Her parents are even less capable of facing their family tragedy than Frank’s, especially her father, who finds reasons to avoid Elsa. During his few visits to the Golden Age, he exhorts her to learn to walk again, already.

Meanwhile, Elsa’s mother, with younger children to care for, is too overwhelmed to do much, and she’s a doormat anyway. So Elsa, like Frank, feels abandoned, especially as she gathers that her younger siblings have taken over her belongings, her bedroom, her place in the house. Never having grappled for existence as Frank did, she’s less defended against her plight, which makes her both more innocent and yet more resolved, in her own quiet, self-enclosed way. She’s waiting for someone to understand her, though she doesn’t quite know it yet.

How these two brave, suffering kids find each other makes for a touching, beautiful story. But it’s not only a romance; I admire the way Elsa and Frank begin to realize themselves, how they unfold as the adults they will become. Which is only natural, for love would otherwise be impossible–and make no mistake, their feelings are real, not puppy love.

Being close made them stronger. They sat talking on the verandah or the back lawn. Their faces had colour. For some weeks now they’d shared the lonely task of rehabilitation, doing their exercises together. The Scottish physiotherapist commented on their rapid progress and motivation. The days were not boring, but seemed to hold at every glance something to tell the other. During the night they missed each other. Each morning was a reunion.

London’s prose is sparing and her chapters short, as is the entire book. But her vision and clarity ring out from every page, and each character has an inner life, not just the principals. I’ve rarely read a novel in which the author paid so much attention to minor figures, but you never feel as if the narrative has lost its way. On the contrary; everything fits. What’s more, the story, though more or less plotless, never flags, as each small moment takes on great significance. And the Golden Age is no Dickensian horror but a warm, sensitive, caring environment, staffed by hard-working people.

Rather, the horrors are the parents, who don’t know how to deal with their children’s illness except as a slap, a shame, a comment on themselves, which only sharpens the divide the kids feel from the outside world. By contrast, Olive Penny, the head nurse, is an intuitive, empathic soul who understands her charges and refuses to judge them. Her search for love mirror’s Frank and Elsa’s, though of course she’s coming from a vastly different perspective. She doesn’t expect much, but she’s not bitter about it–she gets that life has its limits, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

Other parallels to Frank and Elsa’s tale are those of Meyer and Ida, his parents. They struggle with their feelings of displacement from Europe, the guilt of having survived, their terror that, as so-called New Australians, they’ll be perpetual foreigners–or, in Ida’s case, her refusal to accept Australia as her permanent home. Meyer unbends more easily and, as such, can help Frank more. But in the end, Frank has his own path to follow, and, true to himself, he finds it from a fellow patient, a boy older than himself who writes poetry in his head while ensconced in an iron lung.

If I have one bone to pick with The Golden Age, it’s that London sometimes tells too much. But she also shows plenty, and with such a light hand that it’s hard to find fault. What a remarkable novel.

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

A Tender Plant: The Ballroom

24 Monday Apr 2017

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Review: The Ballroom, by Anna Hope
Random House, 2016. 313 pp. $27

Ella Fay feels so oppressed by the Yorkshire textile mill at which she works that she breaks a window in a frenzied fit. For her crime, and because this is England in 1911–when the lower classes aren’t deemed to have feelings, let alone to be worth understanding–she’s bundled off to Sharston, an institution on the moors.

West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, (later High Royds Psychiatric Hospital), was the model for Sharston. One of Hope’s forbears was an inmate, for a time (courtesy highroydshospital.co.uk, 2006, via Wikimedia Commons)

Sharston is a desperate place that mingles the mentally disturbed with people who only seem so or who plainly aren’t, and whose only offense is poverty. But no matter how they got there, they know that no one leaves except feet first, about which there are many terrible rumors and some hard evidence, for a few men are assigned to dig the common graves.

John Mulligan is one, a man weighed down by promises he broke and wrong turns he made. But he’s sensitive and intelligent–far more than the asylum officials who keep him locked up–and you sense that something within yearns to break out and, if necessary to break heads.

But Sharston has one redeeming activity. Though the men and women are strictly segregated, once a week, those who’ve behaved themselves are allowed into the ballroom to dance. Through John’s eyes, you see the anticipation:

The men on John’s side disappeared off to the washrooms, and when they came back they had scrubbed faces and hair spat on and smoothed down. You could taste their excitement, thick and sticky, filling the air and leaving room for little else. It disturbed the far-gone ones on the other side, who got restless in their chairs and moaned and shouted out. John sat himself in the corner and took small shallow breaths, trying not to let it in; it was a terrible dangerous contagion, hope.

John and Ella dance, and from that springs an unlikely romance. What a tender plant it is, their love, for, if discovered, it will be uprooted; and meeting outside dancing hours is strictly against the rules. But John contrives to write Ella letters and smuggle them to her. At first, he only describes the sky and trees he sees during his work, because he knows Ella’s shut inside, as are all the women, which he considers an outrage. But what he doesn’t know is that Ella can’t read, and that she must ask her friend Clem to help her. (Clem is short for Clemency, an ironic name, for she receives none.) So Clem becomes Fay’s scribe, deriving perhaps too much vicarious pleasure from her role and inevitably forgetting where the boundaries lie.

It’s a brilliant touch, but no less so the character of Charles Fuller, the assistant medical officer. Fuller believes in eugenics, and as the novel opens, he’s struggling against the main intellectual current of his scientific faith, which says that enforced sterilization is the only way to preserve England. Otherwise, the nation will be overrun by the poor, the unfit, and the mentally ill, too depraved to know better than their savage ways, or even to care. It’s blood-curdling to read this tripe–even worse to know that such luminaries as Winston Churchill actually agreed–but at first, Fuller objects, because he believes that he can “save” John Mulligan and burnish his own career by doing so. So he makes many observations about John, intending to write a paper contesting that certain promising asylum inmates may, in fact, be rehabilitated.

However, Fuller has a deeper conflict. He’s a repressed homosexual, and he believes that if he followed his desires, not quite expressed but tangible nonetheless, he’d be filthy, dangerous, and depraved. In other words, he’d be no better than Sharston’s population, whom he holds himself above with a tenacity that shows how inadequate he feels (and once you meet his parents, you know why). Consequently, since he can never follow his heart or be happy, he hates anyone who can. John and Ella, be warned.

I criticized Hope’s previous novel, Wake, for the shallowness of the male characters. Nothing could be further from the truth in The Ballroom. Fuller, John, and John’s friend, Dan Riley, are complete people, and several minor male characters come across strongly as well. I think Hope relies too heavily on coincidences, of which one’s okay, but three’s a crowd. Similarly, Fuller’s behavior doesn’t always seem consistent with his character, as if his erratic boomerangs served the author’s purpose too conveniently. And, as usual, I wonder why Hope needs her prologue, which, also as usual, compromises the tension somewhat.

Nevertheless, The Ballroom is a marvelous novel, full testimony to the power of love, and I highly recommend it.

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

Destroyed by Desire: The Midnight Cool

20 Monday Mar 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Life Hangs on Chance: City of Secrets

26 Thursday May 2016

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Review: City of Secrets, by Stewart O’Nan
Viking, 2016. 194 pp. $22

Brand, a Latvian survivor of the Holocaust, drives a taxi in Jerusalem in 1945. But that simple statement skips over many complexities. The British are clinging to their mandate over Palestine, refusing entry to dispossessed Jews like Brand and combing the population for illegal immigrants, whom they deport. Consequently, he must live underground, so his papers, taxi, and apartment come courtesy of a revolutionary cell committed to Israeli independence, which knows him only as Jossi. Since even the possession of a weapon is a hanging offense, ferrying his comrades to clandestine rendezvous or military operations puts him in great danger.

Jerusalem, VE Day, May 8, 1945 (Courtesy Matson Photographic Service, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Jerusalem, VE Day, May 8, 1945 (Courtesy Matson Photographic Service, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Naturally, Brand becomes more than a chauffeur, about which he has mixed feelings–repugnance at violence, excitement at wielding power, pride in helping create a Jewish homeland. But as his role widens, he realizes that his cell, which he thought belonged to the Haganah, a comparatively moderate organization, has been taken over by the more violent, provocative Irgun. What holds him together is his love for Eva, a fellow Latvian and cell member, who arouses his jealousy by working as a prostitute to gain information.

From this tense, conflict-ridden premise comes a thriller of remarkable depth and breadth, especially considering how spare it is. The jacket quotes a blurb by Alan Furst, and O’Nan deserves the compliment in more than one way. Not only has he shown the same elegant economy as the best of Furst’s more recent World War II thrillers, he’s pushed the envelope. Rather than have Brand be an expert, O’Nan makes him an amateur who can’t master his risky impulses to retain human connection when the smart money says to shut up and pretend you see nothing. But how could he remain silent, when his wife, parents, grandparents, and sister were all murdered, and when he watched a friend stomped to death in a concentration camp? Brand’s confusion and ambivalence, rather than sangfroid or professional devotion, are what drive the narrative.

As with Furst, City of Secrets tastes of atmosphere:

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. . . . The very stones were secondhand, scavenged and fit back into place haphazardly, their Roman inscriptions inverted. It was the rainy season, and the walls were gray instead of golden, the souks teeming with rats. An east wind thrashed the poplars and olive trees, stirring up trash in cul-de-sacs, rattling windows. He’d lost too much weight during the war and couldn’t get warm.

When Brand goes into action, there’s tension aplenty. But the author also captures tension of a different kind, the everyday variety. Brand must wait for information, which usually comes unexpectedly and never fully enough to satisfy his curiosity. Every drive through Jerusalem means passing British roadblocks, where there’s always a chance he’ll be discovered as an illegal immigrant, or that soldiers will search his car and find what he’s not supposed to have. He craves Eva’s company, but also her love, which she denies him, and which he’s learned never to discuss. Accordingly, every move Brand makes, even if it’s to stay in his apartment, alone, ratchets up the stakes.

City of Secrets manages to suggest much about politics and hatreds without having to narrate them, an admirable part of the economy I mentioned. O’Nan conveys the bitter divisions between the Haganah and the Irgun; the British occupiers’ anti-Semitism; and the moral challenges inherent to fighting for a righteous cause. I like City of Secrets much better than a novel I reviewed on a similar subject, I Lived in Modern Times, or, for that matter, O’Nan’s West of Sunset, about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years. That was a nice novel; City of Secrets is terrific.

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

Will the Walking Wounded Speak Up?: The Railwayman’s Wife

18 Monday Apr 2016

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Review: The Railwayman’s Wife, by Ashley Hay
Atria, 2013. 269 pp. $26

One moment, you’re feeling confident, happy, because you believe that you’ve preserved the most precious part of life. The next moment, your security has vanished; how do you cope?

That’s the question behind this gorgeously written, deceptively gentle novel about loss. World War II has hardly ended, and Anneke Lachlan lives with her husband, Mac, and their ten-year-old daughter, Isabel, in an Australian coastal village. They’re the sort of people you’d love to know–thoughtful, passionate, delighting in beauty. They have little money, but their only regret on that score is not being able to visit Mac’s birthplace in Scotland, a trip they’ve both yearned to make. Nevertheless, they delight in fashioning or finding gifts for one another that offer new experiences or ways of seeing things.

Three Australian soldiers, all winners of the Victoria Cross, 1946 (Courtesy Australian War Memorial; public domain).

These three Australian soldiers all won the Victoria Cross and were lucky enough to live to tell about it (1946, courtesy Australian War Memorial; public domain).

But behind that warmth lurks the terrible suffering of the war, whose survivors are conscious that many people didn’t make it. Anneke, known as Ani, is glad her husband kept his job with the railroad rather than enlist. But in the back of her mind, she still worries sometimes, vaguely, that chance will take Mac from her yet. And that’s what happens; a railway accident claims his life, and the pain overwhelms her.

How Ani faces her loss–or not–makes a touching, subtle narrative, of small moments carefully rendered that reveal her character, her place in the village, how people look out for her, and what they expect. She takes a part-time job in the tiny local library and tries to find solace in books. Nor is she the only one to suffer. Frank Draper, a doctor who served in the war, can’t forget the liberated concentration camp inmates whose lives he couldn’t save. He returns to his native village irritable, cynical, and morose, taking up a medical practice but unsure whether he’ll stay.

His boyhood friend Roy McKinnon, a poet who also saw wartime action and won fame for a single poem about it, has come back also, so shaken that he can’t write. He lives with his lonely, difficult sister, Iris, who loved Frank Draper before the war and still hopes to marry him. Roy takes a fancy to Ani, first as a muse, as he struggles to find words worth putting on a page, and then more deeply. But will any of these people have the emotional resilience to break out of the hardened defenses they’ve built for themselves? There are still words they can never say (or write), because they seem risky or paltry or ridiculous next to how they’ve been hurt, or too challenging for the myths they’ve woven to comfort themselves.

A lesser authorial hand might have surrendered to the temptation to dip these familiar themes and situations in treacle and serve up an easier story. Not here. Hay has taken the high road, climbing a good, long way to do so. With one exception, nobody makes life simple for themselves or anyone else, whatever kindness or generosity they may have, and they often refuse to see what’s plainly before them. That makes them utterly believable. And as I suggested above, the prose doesn’t hurt, either:

It’s a still and sunny day, the water flat and inky, the escarpment colored golden and orange, pink and brown. As the train takes the curves and bends of its line, the mountain’s rock faces become great stone monoliths that might have come from Easter Island, and then the geometric edges of some desert temple. Here are the hellish-red gashes of coke ovens; here is the thin space where there’s only room, it seems, for a narrow road, a narrow track, between the demands of sea and stone.

Hay strikes two false notes, however, in her characterizations. Isabel, Ani’s daughter, is the exception to the high road, the only person not to subvert herself. She’s impossibly adorable, empathic and perceptive beyond her years, a child you’d gladly bring home and raise as your own. Unfortunately, I don’t believe she exists. Not once does she act out, throw a tantrum, complain, or even shout or scream–and this is a girl who just lost the father she worshiped. Not only that, when Ani raises her voice to her–all two instances of it–the mother feels like a criminal, which feels too perfect.

At the other extreme, Frank Draper becomes more human, though it’s not clear how. He’s not the sort to talk about what he saw or his feelings, so I want to see how Iris expects to cozy up to him. But Hay doesn’t show this. Are we meant to assume that Iris believes her interest in Frank will melt his icy exterior? I’d need to see that happen before I agree with her.

All the same, The Railwayman’s Wife is a beautiful novel.

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

Fugitives from Injustice: Fallen Land

08 Monday Feb 2016

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Review: Fallen Land, by Taylor Brown
St. Martin’s, 2015. 276 pp. $26

It’s 1865, and the Confederacy is on its last legs. Brigandage rules swaths of the Deep South, unleashing “foragers” from either army (or neither), who plunder farms or towns, hunt runaways for bounty fees, and satisfy their lusts for blood or female flesh. Callum, a member of one such Confederate gang, already has a checkered past, even at age fifteen. Of Irish birth, parents dead, he’s worked as a crewman on a Confederate ship running the Union blockade; been shipwrecked; killed men older than himself; and become an accomplished horse thief.

Shermans March to the Sea, Alexander Hay Ritchie, 1868

Sherman’s March to the Sea, Alexander Hay Ritchie, 1868 (Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain in the U.S.)

One day, however, Callum tries to break free. He steals his colonel’s stallion and makes off with Ava, a girl two years older than he, whom the gang captured as booty, and whom the colonel has taken for his own. Ava, though wary, goes willingly with Callum, because she sees no other future. But in the firefight whose confusion allows the pair to escape, the colonel is killed, and Callum knows the others won’t rest until they run Ava and him to ground.

What follows is a fast-paced, compelling story that never flags for an instant. The fugitives suffer intense physical privations, endure injuries, make difficult moral choices, and endure hair-raising escapes. Their greatest ally is their horse, Reiver, a loyal, hard-working beast, perhaps the truest soul in this book.

Brown’s often beautiful prose helps propel the story:

Here and there a spurt of the brightest otherworldly red marked the hillside. The color explosive, lifting, like a hemorrhage from the earth. Callum looked hard for these sights, and they made him ache. He knew the falling land was telling him something, and the message yearned in his throat to be spoken. But he would not speak it. Could not. When Ava fell asleep on the back of the horse, he took her cool white hand in his for a long moment. Her palm was calloused like a boy’s, her finger bones delicate. He placed her hand back in the pocket of his coat, where she kept it warm.

It’s a lovely scene, but a good editor would have caught two mistakes here, the type that pepper this novel. Calloused should be callused, and I don’t believe Callum, who has little formal education, would even know the word hemorrhage. I don’t mean to be picky. Brown has painted a vivid narrative that ranges over a landscape he knows and loves, and which he renders in gripping detail. Nevertheless, it’s startling, especially given such skill, to run across misused words, those that sound too modern, or alien concepts. For instance, I don’t believe Ava when she talks about Charles Darwin or the rather baldly stated theme she derives from his theories. And speaking of theme, I think the reader already gets that in this shamelessly bloody world of 1865 Georgia, the only thing that matters is love; the characters need not spell it out as they do.

Unfortunately, that love is more complicated than Brown allows. I hate to say so, because Ava and Callum are sweet together, a winning pair, and I understand Brown’s desire to rescue redemption from the terrors he’s so faithfully rendered. But Fallen Land, despite its gory, realistic grounding, sometimes reads like a story cleaned up, with characters groomed to appeal. It’s not just that certain fight scenes work out too smoothly (or that, early on, Callum receives serious facial injuries that heal quickly, without trace). Nor is it only that the two main characters seldom have occasion to express their attitudes about race, and when they do, seem more like abolitionists than Confederate sympathizers. Rather, it’s that the narrative has handed Ava and Callum to one another too easily.

Whether the colonel takes Ava by brute force or implied threat isn’t clear. But rape is rape, and what’s more, she’s pregnant by him. Yet despite this abuse–and a pretense of a hard exterior–she craves love and tenderness and readily accepts them from the next man who treats her decently, even if he’s a boy. Nothing beneath the surface is allowed to intervene, so that, when Ava worries–but once–that she’s carrying another man’s child, Callum empathically but naively replies that she should just pretend it’s his. Case closed.

I don’t know why Brown chose this path. Ava would have made much more sense as a character, and heightened the tension tenfold, had she held herself aloof, making Callum wonder whether he’s risking his life for a dream of happiness with her that he can’t fulfill. His insecurity would have added a fresh dimension to the novel. Then, too, Callum kills repeatedly, yet never seems troubled by it, though he has bloody dreams involving Reiver, Ava, and their pursuers. I get that he’s grown up too fast to tear himself to shreds over these killings. Yet, like Ava, he exists too much in the moment, in which the past has no place in his psychology.

Fallen Land, despite its promise, fails to deliver. But I expect to hear more from Taylor Brown.

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

Dabblers at War: The Race for Paris

05 Monday Oct 2015

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Review: The Race for Paris, by Meg Waite Clayton
Harper, 2015. 311 pp. $26

Jane Tyler, a fledgling reporter from a Nashville paper, and Olivia (Liv) Harper, a young photographer from New York, are covering the American army following the D-Day landings in Normandy. Or, rather, they’re trying to, but the prejudice against female journalists prevents them from gaining accreditation to the front lines. So they sweet-talk Fletcher, a British intelligence photographer who happens to be a good friend of Liv’s husband, to drive them through the war zone, against all regulations. Their goal: To get to Paris the moment the city is liberated and score a scoop.

Fletcher’s ability to roam anywhere seems a mite improbable, as does his job, taking pictures of enemy installations that somehow prove of instant use. But no carping, here. Fletcher has always been sweet on Liv; he takes a liking to Jane too, who returns the feeling; and their adventures make for gripping reading. The whole setup offers a terrific opportunity for exploring feminist themes, which Clayton clearly wishes to do. And having recently returned from a hiking trip to Normandy (see my photo, below), I was primed for a story like this.

t's hard to believe that these hills near St.-Martin-de-Sallen were the scene of bloody fighting in August 1944.

It’s hard to believe that these quiet, bucolic hills near St.-Martin-de-Sallen, Normandy, were the scene of bloody fighting in August 1944.

The Race for Paris focuses on the victims of both sides. To that end, Clayton underlines American excesses or mistakes, as with the intentional destruction of St.-Lô, or when friendly fire kills or wounds hundreds of soldiers in their foxholes, an incident that never made the press. We’ve heard so much puffery about the Greatest Generation and the good fight, it’s refreshing to read a novel daring to point out that our boys were human after all. And Clayton excels at depicting the carnage, the waste, the poignancy, in prose that often attains effortless beauty.

Nevertheless, she seems too rigorous in her intent. It’s not just that she can’t make up her mind whether she’s writing historical fiction or history, as when she borrows a well-known quote about St.-Lô and lets her characters hear it, a self-conscious you-are-there moment that undercuts an otherwise touching scene. Nor is it Jane’s startling omniscience, when, out of nowhere, she somehow acquires a theoretical grasp of an immense, fluid battlefront that nobody could have observed through the cracked window of a wandering jeep.

Rather, it’s Jane’s moral omniscience, which comes without a struggle, that absolutely kills this book for me. It’s one thing to view Germans and Allies as victims and see individual circumstance as paramount, but it’s another to make that judgment willfully ignorant of the context. The narrative says nothing about the Occupation, except that it’s “brutal,” or to note that children look painfully thin. Nor does Clayton show collaboration or even mention the Gestapo or the SS–whose crimes right after D-Day were arousing great fury–or the Holocaust. She does drag in a few Jews at the end, but I’m not buying.

I’m not saying Clayton should have had her characters discuss all these things; that would have sounded canned and ruined the narrative. Still, Liv and Jane seem unconscious of what’s happening–and what has happened–around them, which spares them the difficulty of having to make complex choices based on inconvenient facts. It also makes them lousy journalists.

Take, for instance, the moment when they witness the signature cliché of the liberation, a man shaving a woman’s head because she slept with a German. Naturally, Liv and Jane vent their outrage on the man who holds the scissors; Fletcher attempts to stop him, in vain. But he also tries to tell his companions that the scene may be more complicated than they know, that the woman probably informed on her fellow villagers or lived high while they starved. To no surprise, given their role in this novel, Liv and Jane shout him down. He can’t be sure, they say, and in retrospect, they may be right. From the holes historians have punched in the legend of near-universal French resistance, it’s just as likely the hair-cutter was himself a collaborator or simply looking to inflict his righteous hatred on a powerless victim.

But the Americans’ snap judgment, their own self-righteousness in quashing what Fletcher says, belies their job to gather the facts, to understand what they’re snapping pictures of or writing in their dispatches. It’s that comfort in ignorance, the failure even to recognize a wider context, let alone try to grasp it, that turns these potential feminist heroines into dabblers, precisely the perception they’re struggling against. The men who’d deny them access to the battlefront, who resent their presence, disparage their abilities, and assume that their only talent is their physical appearance, would have said, “You see, dear, this is men’s business, and you really do know nothing about it.”

Had the narrative lingered on the shearing scene to explore whether a woman’s lot in war is to pay for men’s mistakes, that would have been a feminist statement. But the author has paced her story too quickly for that, seldom lifting the feminist lens beyond the premise that two young women have crashed a men’s club. I wanted to see Liv and Jane challenge what they might have been taught as girls or hesitate the least little bit about the allegedly masculine role they were choosing. What feminism takes for granted today was much newer and scarier in 1944; the 1960s hadn’t happened yet, but again, the novel feels retrospective, as though all that had gone before. The love triangle with Fletcher offers rich ground for a feminist conundrum, especially what it means to be attracted to a man who is, after all, their savior and guide, the traditional male figure. But Clayton doesn’t go there, leaving us with the same old story. What a shame.

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

Portrait of an Era: Villa America

13 Sunday Sep 2015

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Review: Villa America, by Liza Klaussmann
Little, Brown, 2015. 426 pp. $26

Sara and Gerald Murphy, according to one contemporary, “had invented summer on the Riviera,” a remark that would have made them cringe. But for the American expatriate literary set in the 1920s, the Murphys weren’t just the life of the party; they were the party. Their ongoing celebration at Villa America, their splendid house at Cap d’Antibes, was a coveted invitation and, later, itself a literary subject. F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated Tender Is the Night to Sara and Gerald (and thought, mistakenly, he’d written their characters); Ernest Hemingway wrote them into The Garden of Eden, a novel published posthumously; and Archibald MacLeish modeled the main characters of J.B., his verse-drama retelling of the Book of Job, after the Murphys.

Cap d'Antibes, 2006 (Courtesy Gilbert Bochenek via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Cap d’Antibes, 2006 (Courtesy Gilbert Bochenek via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

That last reference tells you that Sara and Gerald suffered great tragedy, a metaphor for the golden years that came to a thudding end. But, as Villa America points out, their story mirrored the time in other ways. The beauty they revealed in the everyday, the ideas and discussions they encouraged, and their generosity toward their guests stimulated both passion and excess, the triumph and ugliness of the Twenties.

Klaussmann bends her considerable talent toward this ambitious subject. She re-creates the setting, the ambience, the devil-may-care, the rivalries, and the outsize personalities, drawing Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Hemingway with particular zest and color. My favorite part of the book, though, was the story of Sara’s and Gerald’s furtive courtship, and how these two lonely people who knew they were different from their horrible families managed to find one another and overcome parental objections to marry. That section reads like the music of isolation, yearning for connection, and the joy and relief at finding it.

In fact, music plays a role. There’s a splendid scene where Sara and her family attend the London premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which had caused such a scandal in Paris. The ballet makes her realize what it is she’s been missing, what she wants:

She wanted to be down on the stage with the dancers, feel her rib cage meet the planks, feel the sickly ache of having her breath knocked out. She was reminded of the first time she’d tasted blood in her mouth (a skating accident), the surprise that it tasted good, rich, tangy on her tongue, the even more startling revelation that she wanted to taste it again.

Naturally, no one else in Sara’s family understands the ballet or what it was trying to say. But she senses that Gerald would have, and from that moment, she feels less alone.

For me, however, the rest of Villa America went downhill, and I found myself plodding through. From the moment the Murphys settle in on the Riviera, each chapter, which covers a particular year, feels like an episode. Many have tension, some are entertaining, but they seem to go around in circles. There are parties at which the Fitzgeralds behave like spoiled children, enraging everyone. Hemingway, a charismatic lout, repays the Murphys’ generous hospitality by treating Gerald with contempt and trying to seduce Sara. And the cycle repeats.

I like stargazing, to a point. But there has to be a unifying thread, or the narrative never gets beyond that, and the one Klaussmann chose doesn’t work for me. Gerald has doubts about his sexual orientation, and though how he deals with this stunts him, his struggle remains largely isolated. I wish I could say more without giving away too much, but I wanted a confrontation, a reckoning, and there wasn’t one, something of an anticlimax.

As a result, Villa America remains for me a series of social situations that contain both beauty and ugliness, sometimes side by side. That’s life, it’s accurate, but it’s not a novel. The joy in the beginning and the tragedy at the end (unfortunately revealed in a prologue; why?) seem like two towers with no connecting wall. There’s a lot of dancing and drinking and back-stabbing taking place between them, but for me, that wasn’t enough.

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

Facing Life After So Much Death: The Heroes’ Welcome

04 Thursday Jun 2015

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Review: The Heroes’ Welcome, by Louisa Young
Harper Perennial, 2015. 263 pp. $15

The Great War has ended only five months before, and Riley Purefoy bears its scars in the most obvious spot: At the Somme, part of his jaw was blown away. Reconstructive surgery has worked marvels, yet children flee from him, he can’t speak clearly, and must drink his tea from a brass tube. Nevertheless, his prewar sweetheart, Nadine Waveney, marries him, trusting to their mutual honesty and understanding to carry them through. No physical wound can obscure from Nadine the kind, courageous, caring man beneath, and she served as a nurse, after all–though she worries, to herself, whether he’ll ever be able to kiss her or make love. The newlyweds’ parents don’t know what shocks them most: Riley’s appearance, that the young couple married without telling them, or that they married at all. Isn’t it obvious Riley’s in no condition to be anyone’s husband or provider? And what of their class differences, since she comes from money, and he, from nothing?

Before-and-after pictures of Walter Yeo, British sailor wounded at Jutland, 1917. He is said to be the first patient to receive reconstructive facial surgery. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Before-and-after pictures of Walter Yeo, wounded British sailor, 1917. He is said to be the first patient to receive plastic surgery. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, his close friend and commanding officer, Peter Locke, has returned from war outwardly whole but a psychological wreck, victim of what today would be called post-traumatic stress. He drinks constantly, has recurrent nightmares about the men he commanded who died in battle, and shuts himself away from his wife, Julia, and their toddler son, Tom. He’s a hard case, Peter, but Julia’s too shallow and self-absorbed to help him. Having sensed their growing estrangement during the war, she decided that she, and not the stress of war, must be the cause, and applied carbolic acid to her face as a beauty treatment. Naturally, she doesn’t get the results she wanted.

The juxtaposition of the two disfigured characters, one of whom can see inside himself and others, while the other sees only surfaces, is a brilliant stroke. It’s one of many in this excruciatingly painful, tender, lyrical, and, by turns, uplifting novel. All four main characters, plus Peter’s cousin Rose, a maternal woman who thinks her role is to pick up the pieces that others let drop, have well-drawn inner lives.

Nadine and Riley come across most clearly, and their wakening to one another and the world where beauty and love for life still exist makes for a satisfyingly real romance. For those interested in such things, Nadine means “hope,” and Riley, “courageous,” while Purefoy suggests the French for “pure faith.” (Contrast with the Malfoys of Harry Potter fame.) Nadine and Riley live up to their names, but only with struggle. Riley hates even the suggestion of pity and is so determined to accept nothing that could even remotely imply charity that he tries the patience of everyone who cares for him. As for Peter and Julia, they’re not finished with each other, despite what it looks like, though it take a while for even a glimmer of hope to show itself.

The Heroes’ Welcome makes difficult reading, at times. The grimness of Riley’s appearance and prospects hit hard, early, putting the reader in the parents’ and in-laws’ places, seeing him for the first time since his wound. Peter’s nightmares are duly horrific, and his behavior hard to take. But I sensed a wave of warmth, compassion, and zest for life gently lapping at the characters’ pain, so that their suffering is by no means all you see. As Nadine observes about art treasures she visits on her honeymoon to Italy:

 

This educational voyage, arranged by a most knowledgeable guide, was peeling mud and sorrow off her soul. She remembered suddenly, one morning, wounded soldiers arriving from the battlefields after days of travel caked in mud, in a dried-out carapace that had to be chipped off them . . . a clay shell like a gypsy’s roasted hedgehog, and God knows what wounds and damage you’d find inside. Every day the cities and the paintings exposed to her long, deep unities of humanity, strong living channels that emerged from the depths of the past like crystal streams bursting from a cavern.

 

Such lyrical prose, with frequent, ironic metaphors (facing facts, or putting a good face on things), is another satisfaction of this terrific novel. I highly recommend it.

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